Chinese idiom · 成语
装聋作哑
Meaning
To feign deafness and muteness; to play ignorant.
Character by character
Origin and story
Literary expressionHàn Diǎn records this expression in the fourth act of Ma Zhiyuan's Yuan-dynasty play Tears on a Blue Gown. Its paired actions mean pretending not to hear and declining to speak: someone deliberately acts as though nothing has come to their attention.
The same phrase appears in the Ming collection Stories to Awaken the World, where a teacher overlooks a pupil's conduct instead of supervising him, partly because he wants the small benefits of the arrangement. These are literary uses, not evidence for a single real incident that coined the idiom. In modern speech it criticizes chosen avoidance or feigned ignorance; the target is deliberate behavior, not an actual hearing or speech disability.
Sources and further reading
In everyday life
大家都在问谁负责补交材料，他却装聋作哑，始终没有回应。
Everyone was asking who was responsible for submitting the missing documents, but he pretended not to notice and never responded.
Usually critical: someone deliberately ignores a matter or acts unaware to avoid involvement.