I’ve finally finished the last chapter (or recipe) in my Sichuan cookery book, a book that isn’t really a book, for can it be a book when it’s only online? If not, what should it be called? A look? It’s taken me a year where I worked really hard for two days, then didn’t do anything for 11 months and then worked really hard again for five weeks. I feel I deserve this short weekend in Guangzhou (廣州 Gong Jau – Broad, Wide Open Space Municipality) that I’m on.
But I’m not here to ‘relax’. One of the last lunches I cooked for four guinea pigs, I horribly, embarrassingly and completely inexplicably ran out of dried chillies in mid-cook! In the middle of a dish, to be exact. The dish was Four Seasons Fried Beans 乾煸四季豆 (gon bin sei gwai dau – dry fry four season bean) and it looked completely wrong and naked with only one or two chillies staring emptily into space.
Ahhrghhh – how could I ever live it down? I couldn’t. Fortunately the other dishes weren’t dry-fried so I got out of it with face semi-intact. But I never want to face such an abhorrent scenario again.
50 RMB’s worth of chillies; that should see me through a couple of weeks at least.
But don’t come to Guangzhou if you’re looking for dried chillies. I bought them all.
Chillies: 辣椒 (lat chiu – hot peppers)
Dried chillies: 辣椒乾 (lat chiu gon – hot peppers dry)
Sichuan food: 川菜 (chuen choy – river vegetable/dish)
That and the fact that I’m going to Kazakhstan in the summer.
I’ve only had one lesson so far, but it seems pretty straight forward – everything is different from English and with lots more consonants. And I have to say, to bang my own drum a little here, comparing my Cantonese course with other courses, the one I’m taking live and the CD Berlitz one I bought at Dymocks, I have to say my Cantonese course is holding up quite well.
Like, when you arrive in Kazakhstan for example – is the most important thing to be able to say “I’m a doctor, are you an actor?” Of course, if you accidentally had your arm cut off or something, you’d want to be able to ask bystanders if they were a doctor, but apart from that …
In the Berlitz course, after hello and thank you, comes “I don’t speak Russian.” So … if you can say that in fluent Russian, wouldn’t that just confuse people? Hello, I’m not Russian, I’m a tourist (you don’t say!) … then straight to transport and of course professions.
I’m sure Berlitz methods are tried and tested and with millions of fans, but personally I’ve never arrived in a new country and felt an urgent need to ask people if they are an actress, or tell them that I’m a tourist. They kind of get that.
Now my Cantonese course, on the other hand, starts with being able to order beer. And other drinks! And then onto food. I like my course. It also contains 63% less violence than other courses.
I think you should take it – today!!!
Oh! NOW I’m disappointed.
Chow Seng Chi (周星馳）was my big Canto love for years and years. Because:
1. Extremely handsome
2. Funny
I used his films as teaching and learning tools of Canto, and when people asked me which Cantonese films I could recommend, I always said “Anything by Chow Seng Chi.” He single-handedly changed the face of Cantonese comedy by using his own Mou lei tau (冇理頭）－ a play on 冇理由 （mou lei yao – “meaningless”) – humour. I used to have a photo of him on my pager in the days of pagers – my husband made me burn it on our wedding day. Yes, the photo.
A big part of his appeal is of course that he speaks Cantonese, a good fighting language perfect for the delivery of a terse put-down, and the Chow Seng Chi-films dubbed into Mandarin I’ve been forced to watch, have of course been not very good at all.
So what does he go and do?
Produce his new films in Mandarin, saying in a recent interview: “Cantonese? Do people still speak that?” and “Everyone in Hong Kong understands Putonghua now.”
What – so he thinks the two languages are interchangeable? That fun, vibrant, expression-laden, infinitely rich Cantonese can be replaced by dry, stick-in-the mud, slang-less Mando?
Chow Seng Chi: TRAITOR! Cantonese made you, and you know it! What are you going to do in your Mandarin films, make Party speeches?
Yesterday I got a new student and bugger me if he wasn’t … Mexican! I mean, what are the chances? Before I went to Mexico, I had only ever met three Mexicans: Hector, a guy →
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It’s a while ago now but I suddenly remembered I spent a month in the USA this summer, doing the Canto thing of course:
SO! That was the end of Naked Cantonese. Four years of laughter and tears, trying not to say “crap” on live radio, trials and tribulations, toilets and twits. Although I’ve only ever listened to one →
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Some people say – well, so what if Mandarin became the official language (or as the South China Morning Post in its endless contortions to please everybody twists it into, the “official dialect”) of Hong →
Wah! So exciting! Here is the true story of what went down in old Guangzhou that fateful day in July.
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If I told you I’d been to a demonstration in the mainland with thousands of people but all the police did was put up some barriers and stand around holding hands, would you believe me? →
Although it’s written in simplified characters: Cool! As! Bro! 涼！ The Cantonese language is under threat, and people all over Hong Kong and Southern China are banding together to show those Mando imperialists that not →
The debate about Canto rages on. Now mainland officials are weighing in, in an about-turn saying the government would “release a policy outline and new regulations to boost Cantonese cultural heritage.” So it’s all over →
Ahhrghhhh … When I set out to make Cantonese a world language, I was mostly concerned with Hong Kong and its people – the way they look down on Cantonese (their own language!!!) calling it →
Well, it’s not really a classifier as such, because classifiers are used to classify specific things, as we’ve seen before in for example: 我有兩隻狗，(o yau leung jek gau) – I have two dogs. 0的 (di) →
