My Cantonese is Better than Your Cantonese.

Hong Kong: Identity Issue

Today, I decided it was time to splurge and spend some money and go eat food at my neighbourhood coffee shop, the expensive one.

I ended up spending a lot of time talking to the kid who works there and he started telling me how he was trying to save up and go to Italy for the summer, and how he spent six years in South Africa as a teenager. I don’t know why he took such a liking to me, probably coz I so obviously look like I didn’t totally grow up in Hong Kong, and people like us, sorta bond on that level often and frequent.

Of course we spoke this funny mixture of English and Chinese which many of us speak. Anyway, whenever this kind of conversation comes up a certain debate always ensures. I call it the, “My Chinese is better than your Chinese” debate.

After a while he mentions, “It’s so obvious that your Chinese is not “Geng,” which means both “Very Kewl” and “with the Proper Annunciation,” depending on the usage. When it’s in the context of this debate, it also means, “I am more low down on our culture than you,” “Just because I lived elsewhere don’t mean, I don’t love HK,” and “Generally, I am just playing, coz you know I take pride in the fact I can still remember my Chinese, even though I didn’t speak it for like six years or whatever.”

Of course, then I start pointing out all the mistakes he made while speaking his Canto, where his tone is off base, where his intonation goes up instead of down, and just whatever I can pick at that moment that might make me more cool.

He retaliates and accuses me of exactly the same. In fact I am pretty sure we’re about as awful or as good as each other. This cultural phenomenon always ends with finding a “proper” Cantonese speaker to mediate. This time it was a woman at the bar, who is also a regular and Donna was asked by both of us, “Which one of us is more Geng ah?”

She listens for a while and go, “You both swam across the border, yesterday.”
(A reference to illegal immigrants, which in time past is how they reached Hong Kong from China.)

I was like, “Yeah, I think his hair is still wet.”

He went, “No way, man. I have been back four years.”

“Well I have been back for longer.”

“Poor you as you still haven’t got it right.”

“Whatever, I can hear you didn’t spend all your life in HK, so it means you have an accent!”

Then another customer comes in, and he had to work. All the while both of us sulk coz neither of us think we sound like, “We just swam across the border.”

He deals with the customer and comes back, I say to Donna, “I think my Chinese is pretty good actually.”

And he goes, “No, flipping, suck dick way. Mine is better.”

Donna takes a big sip out of her white wine, “You two are about as bad as each other.”