Teacher, Brother, Boss — What to Actually Call People in China

A reader wrote to us last month with the most relatable panic in cross-cultural life: "I'm meeting my girlfriend's father next week. What do I call him? Mr Chen feels like a job interview, and Uncle feels like a proposal."

The honest answer is that English hands you about three settings — Mr, first name, nothing — while Chinese hands you a whole control panel. The good news is that the panel has a logic, and about four buttons cover ninety percent of situations. Here is the panel.

Start with lǎoshī, the title that left the classroom

老师 (lǎoshī, "teacher") long ago escaped the school gate. Yes, it addresses your actual teacher, but it also greets editors, artists, academics, doctors of anything, and anyone who has just demonstrated visible skill at something. Paired with a surname — 王老师 (Wáng lǎoshī) — it is the single safest honorific in the language when you know nothing else about a person.

Where an English speaker reaches for "sir" or a nervous over-use of "Dr.", a Chinese speaker reaches for lǎoshī. If you remember one button from this entire article before a trip, remember this one. Worst case, you have slightly over-praised someone, which is among the more forgivable failures available to a visitor. It costs nothing, flatters no one falsely, and has never once started an argument — there are titles later in this article that cannot say the same.

Shīfu is for hands and steering wheels

师傅 (shīfu) began as an honorific for master craftsmen, and you can still feel the workshop in it. Today it is the standard address for taxi and ride-hail drivers, repair technicians, movers, cooks, and generally anyone whose competence you can watch happening. It says "you are the expert here," which is exactly the right thing to say to the man holding your radiator together.

Usage leans northern — you will hear it constantly in Beijing — while southern cities spread the honorifics around differently, sometimes favoring kinship terms where the north uses shīfu. The rule of thumb travels better than the map: if someone can fix it, drive it, or build it, they are shīfu.

Gē and jiě, kinship as flattery

哥 (gē, "older brother") and 姐 (jiě, "older sister") have migrated from the family tree into the workplace and the street. 陈姐 (Chén jiě) is how the whole office addresses the person who actually knows where the supplies are; 小哥 (xiǎogē, "little brother") is how the city thanks its delivery riders. Used well, the pair adds instant warmth.

The trap is that these titles encode relative age, and China keeps score. Address a twenty-nine-year-old as 阿姨 (āyí, "auntie") and you have just aged her a decade and a half; 大姐 (dàjiě, "big sister") aimed at the wrong woman lands somewhere between "ma'am" and an insult. The safe play is echo, not initiative: use gē and jiě only after you have heard someone else use them first, or after the person has claimed the title.

Lǎobǎn and other flattering fictions

老板 (lǎobǎn, "boss") is addressed to actual bosses, but also cheerfully to shopkeepers, stall owners, and taxi drivers — 老板，去机场 ("boss, to the airport") — as a small standing compliment meaning "you're the one in charge here." The female proprietor gets 老板娘 (lǎobǎnniáng), a warm, old-fashioned word with no clean English equivalent. Calling a stranger lǎobǎn also has a cheerful way of working in almost any transaction where you cannot tell who actually runs the place, which in a busy shop is most of them.

Then there is the ambient flattery of service culture, which varies by region: staff in many cities call customers 帅哥 (shuàigē, "handsome") and 美女 (měinǚ, "beauty"), while in Guangdong you will hear 靓仔 (liàngzǎi) and 靓女 (liàngnǚ) doing the same job in Cantonese flavor. This is background music, not romance. Smile, accept, and do not correct anyone.

Xiǎo Wáng, Lǎo Lǐ, and the arithmetic of age

Prefixes do age math in public. 小 (xiǎo, "little") plus a surname — 小王 (Xiǎo Wáng) — is for the young or the junior, used by peers and seniors alike. 老 (lǎo, "old") plus a surname — 老李 (Lǎo Lǐ) — arrives somewhere in middle age and is somehow affectionate rather than rude. Both are marks of belonging; strangers do not get them.

Three footnotes. Do not deploy 老- upward at your own boss unless invited. Expect women to be issued 小- for longer than seems fair; norms are shifting. And note that the full name is the formal register — rosters, announcements, mild parental trouble — while the given name alone is intimacy, which is why colleagues may reach it with a foreigner quickly: your foreign name already feels like a given name, and using it is friendliness, not presumption.

A visitor's playbook

The ladder, from safest to boldest:

For the reader with the girlfriend's father: you cannot solve it alone, and you are not supposed to. Ask her what the family says, default to surname plus a warm title if she shrugs, and let the man himself issue an upgrade if he wants one. Being slightly formal and visibly respectful has never once failed a visitor to China — and asking "what should I call you?" is itself a small compliment in any language.