#7 Five rice and other stories….

I get asked this all the time: why is it, after having spent over 20 years in Hong Kong, I am still unable to speak Cantonese. There is no simple answer. I try to explain the difficulty of learning a language which is structured very differently from my native tongue of English. Most of the time, this excuse sounds pretty lame, because I’m explaining this in English to a Cantonese speaker – who presumably had the same difficulty as myself, only in reverse. I’ve spent a long time analyzing the reasons for my ineptitude, and, other than saying I’m lazy, I don’t need to learn and I couldn’t be bothered, the complications of Cantonese seems to suffice as a reason. Just to make things worse, my wife is Cantonese, and both my children speak the language.

 

I have come to accept the consequences of not learning the language, as the following examples illustrate.

 

Feeding myself requires braving the elements caused by my lack of Cantonese. Ordering from the fast food hall at Festival Walk (our local shopping mall) is usually quite easy. It’s simply a case of pointing at the plastic version of what you want to buy.  So, I point, and inform the cashier that I want to “take out”. She looks a little puzzled, but accepts my payment. I arrive home, looking forward to my ramen (a kind of Japanese noodles in soup) with a pork cutlet. I open the container, and notice the lack of cutlet. After digging around the ramen, searching for the missing meat, I come the horrible conclusion that the cashier had taken my “take out” instruction literally, and had removed the cutlet. After that incident, I always say jow la and use my thumb to point over my shoulder when ordering fast food.

 

My wife called and asked me to buy dinner at the fast food hall at Lok Fu’s Jusco (our local supermarket). I was instructed to buy some fried rice and vegetables. Easy enough, except I was going to have to order in Chinese, because the girl at the cashier didn’t speak English. I know how to say vegetables – just say choy choy, the girl will reel off a few examples, and I stop her when she says baht choy. But fried rice is a bit tricky because chow fahn could be interpreted as “smelly rice” if I get the pronunciation wrong, so I give it a go and hope she can understand a bit of English. So I ask for “fried rice”. To which the girl replied, “five rice?”. The people in the queue are curious too – what does this gweilo want with five boxes of plain rice? I try again “no, no, fried rice”, accompanied by arm movements supposedly representing a cook stir frying in a wok. Still puzzled faces everywhere, and no attempt by someone in the queue to help out. So in the end, I arrive back home minus dinner. After telling the story, my wife makes some pot noodles, which tasted much better than usual.

Ordering is a problem, particularly when it’s done face to face, because the person taking the order can sometimes get a bit uptight and nervous when they see me coming. Take the time I placed an order with a girl at KFC. She asked me what I wanted: I said two, to which she instantly responded: number two. No, I replied, I want two…. zinger burgers. OK. I’m thinking, maybe I can get her to relax a bit if I speak in my broken Cantonese. So next, I try asking for two…. suk mai, which is corn in Cantonese. Her reply was completely off track: Pepsi? she asked. Oh dear. I could see that this was going to be difficult. So I say ”corn” in English, and pretend to be eating one. Now she understood. For the last part of the order, I’m thinking, there is no way she will understand potato, but I give it a try, and zut alors! she understood. But I still think she could try and relax a little.    

 

Our local Pizza Hut always tastes great, and they deliver, so that makes them convenient too. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t get into confusing situations when placing an ordering. For instance, my youngest son only likes cheese and ham toppings. Although I can place his order to an English speaking customer relationship manager, I still have to be careful. If I ask for a regular, deep-pan cheese and ham pizza, the person on the other end of the phone will always ask, “do you mean, ham and cheese?”. To which I’m have to wonder to myself, “is there a difference?”, what if I insist on a cheese and ham, will the person reject my order? how do I explain this to my son? So, to save any hassle, I simply reply, “sorry, yes, I’ll have a ham and cheese, please”. 

#6 Mobiles

Don’t get me wrong, mobile phones (as they are called in Hong Kong) are amazing, not so much because the technology involved, but how they have changed society, particularly in Hong Kong, where the spoken language of Cantonese is far more dominant than the written word. The influence of mobile phones is massive in Hong Kong, with a pentration rate of over 140%, and where there are more mobile phones than fixed line telephones.

I’m old enough to remember when mobile phones didn’t exist, so the contrasts and changes I have seen have been quite marked – for me at least.

For instance, the picture below is my son’s Nokia XpressMusic, which weighs 72 grammes, and my wife’s first “mobile phone” which she bought in 1991. The handset for the CT2 system called Tien Dey Seen (by Hutchison) and the accompanying pager weigh in at a massive 273 grammes. That’s 3x heavier than a standard mobile of today. Worse, the Tien Dey Seen handset could only send calls, which is why I’ve included the pager. However, if technology has reduced the size of handsets to miniature levels, the social influence of mobiles in Hong Kong has increased exponentially.

I’m sure the reason why my wife chose a Teen Day Seen was because the cost was considerably less than a more sophisticated phones that were available at the time. As this advertisement from the Standard newspaper’s classified section of September 1991 shows, the cost of a Motorola 8000H was a whopping HK$12,000. That was equivalent to a month’s rent for a 1,000 sqft flat in Mid-Levels or 400 shares of HSBC (HK$12,000 now would only buy you 100 shares or a very small flat far from town).

PS: don’t ask me what the Chinese Businessman wants with a woman’s biodata! Also, I assume he wants her number, not her actual telephone – but then again, if she sent him her brand new Motorola 8000H, I don’t think he would be too unhappy!

Five talking styles

As far as I can tell, there are four styles of mobile phone user in Hong Kong: 1) the screamers, usually uneducated middle aged/old men and women, who sound like they don’t need a mobile phone, because they tend to bellow their way through a conversation 2) whisperers, always young women, who you can see are talking about something, but, for some strange reason, no semblance of sound seems to be eminating from them. How the person on the other end of the line can hear what she is saying is a complete mystery 4) hand over the mouth, almost always done by women who are trying to hide what they are gossiping about. What is interesting about this foible is that if the person is trying to avoid others from lip reading what they are saying it is totally unnecessary, because you cannot lip-read Cantonese 4) people like myself that talk on the phone, the same way they would speak using a land line, and only when required, and 5) most disturbingly, the bluetooth headset crowd, who walk around town seemingly talking to themselves.

1 lost and 3 found

I’ve only ever owned two mobile phones, this condemns me to the tag of a “non-millenian”, maybe even a “non-Generation Y or X” (i.e. someone that’s constantly changing/updating their mobile phone). The first phone I owned was in 1996. It was a tiny, Motorola PEBL flip, which I lost in a taxi coming back home at night from Lok Fu. As is the usual practice, I placed the phone on the seat after I entered, and didn’t pick it up. The fact the phone was the smallest ever built at that time, may have contributed to the loss, but absent-mindedness, and the manufacturer’s curse were mostly to blame. However, I do have the distinction of having found three mobiles – two of which were in taxis, while the other one was underneath the seat at a cinema. The first mobile I found was in the back of a taxi. Stupidly, as I was later to discover, upon finding the phone, I handed it to the taxi driver. He gratefully, took charge of it. I proudly told my wife what I had done, only to watch her roll her eyes in disgust and for her to explain that the driver had probably sold the phone within minutes of receiving it. I naively explained that I thought he would have handed it in to some sort of taxi-drivers’ lost mobile phone collection center (or the “TDLMPCC”). I was told that next time I should keep the phone and call the owner. So, upon finding another phone soon afterwards (a week if I recall), I did as I was told and promptly delivered it to my wife. Who rolled her eyes again, and asked why I was so stupid. Now she would have to call the person (judging by the amount of cutey stuff hanging from the phone’s strap – it was probably some young girl) and arrange to meet her and so on.  I was now told to leave any other phones I might find where they were and let someone else take care of them. The third phone I found was under the seat I was sitting on in the AMC Cinema in Festival Walk (our local mall). This time my wife was present. I was alerted to the presence of the phone, because it started ringing. This time, the decision was easy, pass the offending piece of electronics to my wife and let her deal with the call. She arranged for the owner (another young female) to meet her outside our block of flats that evening.