Face, thanks to Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) seminal work, has attracted an enormous amount of attention in linguistic pragmatics. Goffman’s now well-recognized classic paper “On Face-work” (Goffman 1955; reprinted in Goffman 1972) has similarly influenced sociology. Interestingly, both works acknowledge their debt to the Chinese origin of face. Ho (1976:867) writes: “the concept of face is, of course, Chinese in origin, and the term is a literal translation of the Chinese lien [liǎn] and mien-tzu [miànzi] (cf. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 1944; Webster’s Dictiona…