“It’s like those French have a different word for everything!” – Steve Martin

I don’t suppose any of you will be shocked to discover that even though I’ve lived in Hong Kong for almost 10 years, I’m far from fluent in Cantonese. Oh, I have a lot of excuses but at the end of the day, that’s just what they are – excuses. I tell myself I travel so much that I’m away more than I’m home. I tell myself that the language is just too damned hard. But the fact remains that I can barely speak or read the native language of the place I call home. (Then again, all of my British friends tell me I don’t even speak English, I speak American.)

Have you noticed how locals don’t expect you to be able to speak the language? Many foreigners come here for just a year or two on short-term ex-pat postings, so they never bother to learn the language. The Chinese have got used to this and so, as Larry Feign noted a decade ago, if you do attempt to learn and speak Cantonese, the person you’re talking to thinks you must be speaking English and that he just can’t understand your accent.

Years ago, my (now ex-) wife and I used to go to the same Cantonese restaurant three or four times a week. And once while sitting there, I turned to my wife and asked, “Honey, I want a Coke, can you get one for me?” To which she replied, “You know how to say it, ask for it yourself.” I grimaced because I knew what was coming.

We called the waiter over and, in Cantonese, I asked him for a Coca-Cola, please. His response was to glare at my wife with a look that clearly said, “Why are you letting your monkey talk to me?” She looked at me and said, “You said it correctly; say it again.” And so I did. Now it finally dawned on the waiter that I was trying to speak Cantonese, but he still wasn’t listening, so I had to repeat it yet again. “Ho-ah,” he muttered as he ran off.

While we all joke about the concept of the ‘long haired dictionary’, the fact that I was married to a native Cantonese speaker for eight years meant nothing in this regard. “All you know in Cantonese is how to ask for a Coke and an ashtray,” she’d sneer. She didn’t understand that while I could pronounce the basic words, I had problems hearing and repeating the proper tones. And anyway, how can I be expected to get the tones right when the experts can’t even agree on how many different tones Cantonese has?

She tried to teach me once. She would say a phrase to me. Probably something simple and useful like, “Where is the toilet?” I’d repeat it as best I could but would mangle the tones, so that it probably came out as, “Can I have sex with your sister?” (Which could also be useful.) So she’d get upset and tell me to repeat it properly. I’d try one more time, at which point she’d yell, “If you’re going to make a joke out of this, I can’t teach you!” and then hit me and leave the room.

On the other hand, I rapidly learned to curse as well as any taxi driver. There’s a saying, “It takes three years to be good at Cantonese but three minutes to be bad.” And I got to be very, very bad. Any time I’d do something to upset my wife, she’d launch off with this stream of Cantonese curses. It was like a scene from I Love Lucy, with her playing the hot-tempered Cuban and me as the dizzy red-haired wife. I enjoyed it so much, I used to piss her off on purpose just to hear her torrent of curses, after which I’d always say, “If you’re gonna call me that, you should tell me what it means.”

She did, and I started taking great joy in displaying my knowledge of at least one little corner of the language. Of course, being me, I took it to extremes, to the point where I actually said “poh kai ( 仆街)” to a triad guy once, knowing full well the meaning of that phrase and who I was saying it to. And hey, I’m still alive. Just don’t count my toes.

The language experience is completely different in Mainland China. There, locals expect you to speak Chinese. After all, you’re in China, why wouldn’t you? A couple of years ago I spent a month studying Putonghua at Fudan University in Shanghai. Any time I got into taxis near the school, the first thing the drivers would ask was if I was teaching there. When I’d tell them I was a student, they would be amazed, and even more so once I told them what I was studying. They all displayed amazing patience and encouragement with my meagre grasp of the language; most also proceeded to try to teach me Shanghainese. My head was exploding from all this and yet every time I was able to talk about the weather with a stranger or order a meal, I glowed from the minor accomplishment.

Everyone knows the Steve Martin quote at the top of this column but how many remember his next line? “You never appreciate your language till you go to a foreign country that doesn’t have the courtesy to speak English.” Well, I do appreciate my language, but thanks, Hong Kong, for having that courtesy and allowing me to be a lazy si fat gwai (屎忽鬼 ).