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Cantonese 101: There is no yes and no! This can create confusion. Of course, many people want there to be a yes (at least) and so they have created a thing where 係 (hai) means →
I discovered a new Canto word this week! And I won’t forget it, because I learnt it in a situation and from a live person, not a dictionary or app. So I do this Sichuan →
I remember when I first came to hong Kong in 1989. The 垃圾蟲 (lap sap chung, litter bug) campaign had just started. Now people would be made to feel bad about littering. Woo-hoo! Nothing seemed →
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Today I want to publicly thank a Norwegian writer named Are Kalvø who in the year 2007 had a brilliant idea which inspired me no end. He would travel all around Norway and eat in →
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Last week I received some shocking news: My banjo teacher is leaving. What??? Now that everything was going so well? Not only do we do the old-fashioned and also modern thing of bartering skills; I →
“Oh sorry, I’m so sorry” this woman is probably not saying. Naw, she’s just serving me some excellent Sichuan food, probably. Anyway, I can’t begin to think how weird it must be for the people →
Yesterday we did a live show on RTHK with ah-Sa shivering with fear as usual – what would I say this time? Last time I said “screw you” about the evil students castigating our dear →
That’s right, to sympathise with my clients’ plight and understand once again what it is to learn a language from scratch, I’ve decided to learn Russian. That and the fact that I’m going to Kazakhstan →
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You know, you don’t have to commit to a whole awful hour a week. No, you can take Happy Jellyfish People’s Democratic Language Bureau’s three hour crash course! Perhaps even a crash course sounds too →
套， mainly classifier for films, as in － 套戲，yat tou hei – a ‘wrapper'(?) of film. Possibly from when films came in big metal cases. By the way, the origin of 戲 hei is ‘Chinese →
With this game I thee wed, I say! With three people, a packet of cards and some kind of flat surface there will be no more boring nights for you. (NB! Can also be played →
That’s right; double whammy today! The classifiers for vehicles and trees!!! 樖 (po) is classifier for trees and plants (but a flower is 一枝花 （yat ji fa) a twig of flower. 呢樖樹好X靚呀。（Li po syu hou →
Yes I know I’ve done 隻 （jek) before, but then I saw this 水牛，seoi ao, yesterday morning, and was lost in classifier-ation once again. It seems that classifiers are simplifying and that people often use →
I’m currently in Hunan province and thought I would share this, one of many wonderful English signs we’ve seen during the last few days, with you. Throwing garbage into the dustbin is indeed lofty behaviour, →
Have you read ‘Outliers’ by Malcolm Gladwell? Splendid book, absolutely fascinating. Eye-opening, funny, full of a-ha moments, it spurs you on so you have to get up at 5am to finish it, having started at →
First of all: Please buy my latest book and second: You’ll never guess where I ended up this week! HKTDC!!! Which I have no idea what stands for. Some magazine. The article is quite sympathetic →
I’ve almost given up going to restaurants in Hong Kong. I find the food tasteless, the chefs complacent.
But there’s one place right here in throbbing metropolis Mui Wo, the venerable Rome Restaurant, that I occasionally visit, mostly for a laugh, to see what they will come up with this time. The food is reasonably priced, it’s close to the ferry, the cook works relatively fast and the air con is so hard-working you can break off pieces of your frozen clothes and use them as a face cooler when you leave the place.
Not the Rome Restaurant
The thing is, they have never, ever given me what I wanted. In my more hard-drinking days I sometimes went there for that proven hangover cure: Hong Kong style club sandwich. (公司三文治 Gong Si (company) saam man ji) Each time I’d say 唔要芝士,唔要青瓜 (m yiu chisi, m yiu cheng gua, not want cheese, not want cucumber)In those days I thought 唔要 (not want) was the way to say “without” in restaurants. It worked everywhere else – except the Roma. Each time the sandwich came with plastic cheddar and limp, cooked cucumber hanging out of it.
“I said don’t want cheese and cucumber?”
“Oh yes, sorry.”
Every time! It became a joke.
Then I learnt that “without” was actually 走， jau, which means leave or run but also, presumably, leave out. This was about the same time as I realised that in Chinese culture, 肉 (yok, meat) only means pork. All the other meats just aren’t meat.
Last month I went to the Roma and ordered 廈門炒米 (Ha Mun Chao Mai, Xiamen rice noodles), a delightful dish with barbecued pork, ham, prawns, egg, peppers, onion and spring onion. Some HK places sensibly add a little pickled ginger for sweetness and moisture.
The Roma does a good one, but it’s normally so full of barbecued pork that all other tastes are drowned out. I told the waiter 走肉 (leave out the meat) and got a Xiamen Noodles with so much barbecued pork it had actually elbowed out the prawns and eggs. I was in such a hurry i couldn’t send it back, but I was not a little irked.
Then yesterday I tried again. I had half an hour to go before the ferry and was overcome with an urge to eat Xiamen Noodles. Again I crazily said 走肉。 By no means a vegetarian, I still don’t like the overpowering taste of HK style barbecued pork.
The waitress came beaming a few minutes later. This was indeed rice noodles, but where was, er everything? This time, “leave out the meat” had been interpreted as “leave out the spring onions, eggs, prawns, sauce and onions. And the meat and the ham.” It was, in fact: Rice noodles on a plate.
New record for Roma! Many people were happy that day. The waitress, the customers sitting nearby, and, to a certain degree, me! I had proof that 走 indeed means “leave out.”
