Bunk Demythed! I Mean Myth Debunked!

Last weekend a group of three ecstatic revellers hopped on the ferry to Jung Saan (Zhongshan) and got straight in a taxi at the ferry pier and darted into the hinterland. In the lovely, slightly →

Guangdong Province! The Best Province with the Best People. It’s Yuge!

Guangdong is the best province in China, and not because of Cantonese! It’s got the friendliest people and the best hovelage. And today I’m off to savour her charms again! I just thought I’d share →

CantoNews 8!!! Live from Garden Cafe (With Sandwiches)

What does this photo of an excellent and ridiculously inexpensive haircut have to do with CantoNews? Nothing! I just like it. In this segment, the venerable Cassette and I visit the Garden Cafe in Pui →

Wild Shenzhen Extravaganza

I always have a good time in Shenzhen’s famed Lo Wu Shopping Centre, even after several hours of “missy missy looking, you buy sunglass okay.” Still, I could really do with less nagging. My student →

Different For Chinese

As I was looking through my old columns from South China Morning Post trying to get some other newspaper gigs (do newspapers even exist anymore?) I found the above story from Norway. Allowed only 450 →

CantoNews Live from the Throbbing Metropolis of Mui Wo

Nick (a.k.a. Cassette) and I go to an Italian restaurant in the throbbing metropolis of Mui Wo, centre of the universe and make a programme about lots of interesting things – specifically the idiotic spelling →

Last Column

Yesterday I had an email from a … person, who said: “I sobbed vehemently when I saw your last Sunday Morning Post entry had come and gone.” Me too, mate, me too. Except I didn’t →

Happy Hong Kong Celebration of the Glorious Return to the Motherland Day Extravaganza!

July 1st! July 1st! That day in year zero for Hong Kong, 1997, it was rather wet. OK, it torrentially bucketed down for about three weeks before and after that momentous day. Coincidence? I think →

Beautiful Day On “Dark” Side

It’s so much fun to have friends visiting Hong Kong, especially when the day they arrive kicks off a week of unprecedented beautiful weather! I shouldn’t say unprecedented; the weather was probably like this every →

How Now, Guangdong Prov?

I’m just about to write my last column ever for South China Morning Post; ever! When I was told the page would be discontinued, I was so sad. How now would I be able to →

Author’s Plight

酒！ Jau! Wine! As they call it. It’s actually a deadly spirit so vile that it should only be used for paint stripping and permanently disfiguring your enemies. Strangely, the (mainland) Chinese drink it with →

Even More About That 嗰!

The New China Bookshop in Guangzhou, or actually, the New China Bookshop in general, is a real treasure trove. Look what I found there last weekend, a map of Mexico with all the towns and →

Girlie Morning in Nature

Are spiders actually really stupid? I mean they can spin these beautiful webs, masterpieces of engineering and all that, but are they a bit dim all the same? This morning I had the first proper →

More About That! 嗰

嗰個人係四川人 (go go yan hai Sei Chyun yan – that piece person is Four River person, that person is from Sichuan) 嗰個人 (go go yan – that piece person). That should be pretty plain sailing →

That! 嗰個！

Here’s a word, short, unassuming, that often creates trouble for my clients (“victims”). It’s 嗰 (go – that.) Now, the word this is never a problem for any of my clients. It’s all 呢個(li go →

Transformation Continues on All Levels 2

Is Cantonese dying? Last weekend’s visit to Guangzhou was quite depressing in many ways. It’s nothing new that people from all over China migrate to Guangdong province, especially Shenzhen and Guangzhou, to make something of →

Transformation Continues On All Levels 1

Guangzhou used to be my favourite city with its leafy streets, car-less alleys and languidly flowing river whose name, Pearl, also gave itself to an excellent beer, 珠江啤酒 (jyu gong beh jau – Pearl River →

Copy The Little Children

In yesterday’s article I advised people who are trying to learn Cantonese to become like a child again. Those little buggers know how to pick up languages all right! First they say “da da da, →

Communi-Play-Tion

It’s no secret that I love the motherland, China, over all other lands, and not only because of Mons 雪花(Suet Fa – Snow Flower) beer and Sichuan food either. I’ve had more fun there than →

Green Island Beer

Hooray! Almost finished with my Sichuan cookbook called What was it again? Cook, something cook, something Sichuan. Something. Anyway, in it I praise that beer so loved and, amazingly, hated, all over the world: “Tsingtao”. →

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Down With Simplified Characters

In a country where the government is so hysterically set on everybody doing everything the government way, for example by banning beautiful, normal Chinese characters on buildings (it must be ‘crippled’, i.e. simplified characters or →

Back By Popular Demand: Classifiers

Photo: 四個靚女 (sei go leeng loy, 4 beautiful girls) Classifiers, measure words, counting words, whatever you want to call them, they are a vital feature of Cantonese. Here you can learn some of them through →

Pro Cantonese Column SCMP

Four years ago thousands of people demonstrated for Cantonese in Guangzhou. Meanwhile the mainland government (aided and abetted by the HK one and Hong Kong and mainland people are hard at work trying to eradicate →

New Series! Countries Of The World In Cantonese

Today: Switzerland 瑞士 Soi si

New company! Everything you’ll ever need to do/know/eat in the world of Sichuan food. I can cook at your house, teach you how to do it, you can come to my house OR buy the →

Oh, Australia! Even yam cha is great there. Normally no one can quite get it right outside China (my experience consists only of Norway, the USA and Australia though) but in Australia they’ve got it →

Space-saving English

“OK, we’ll have to write Seafood and Hotpot here in English too” “Oh shit! We’re run out of space!” “That’s okay. Just shorten it where you can. No one is going to read it anyway.”

The Uncle is currently in Australia, shooting a new film about the rubbish incinerator Hong Kong’s government is planning to build right outside my kitchen window. As usual, he does the bidding of his dear →

I took up the banjo partly to understand what it’s like to learn something new, better to sympathise with my students. Now more than ever I see the importance of practise. I have been practising →