Sichuan CooKIT

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 difficult-to-acquire ingredients such as Sichuan peppercorns and proper chilli flakes, from me. I will then send you the recipes for what you want to cook in pdf or e-book format.

你有無睇醫生？ Have you seen a doctor?

There’s been a lot of flu and crap floating around in Hong Kong recently – even I got it! But this wasn’t your common or garden swine flu 豬流感 (zhyu lao gam) – this was at least shark flu! 鯊魚流感 (sa yü lao gam)

It was highly unpleasant, so unfair and deeply irritating. But it made me remember this film I made a few years ago. From it you can pick up a highly useful piece of conversation: Have you seen a doctor?

Cough once, have a broken nail or split ends – off to the emergency ward with you!

Philadelphia Offers Freedom From Mando

So this plan of mine to eat my way through all the Chinese restaurants in the USA is kind of almost working out. A little. I think I’ll be able to do about 90%, including →

Civilised? Ha Ha Haaaaa

Last weekend we were in Mui Jau (梅州）which, although it’s in Guangdong province, bears the dubious distinction of being completely Mando speaking. People told me it was because it was a Hakka stronghold, but I →

Progress and Regress

Learning or even speaking Cantonese is no game for the timid. It is, quite frankly, something of a never-ending fight with frequent setbacks and few triumphs. The other day I was in the Holly in →

Nostalgia Time

I want to post some old Cantonese The Movie movies here again as I think they’re being criminally overlooked by the public. Criminally. I want this one to go viral with more than 50 viewers! →

Buy SCMP On Sunday

Next Sunday I have a feature in the South China Morning Post (Post Magazine) about Cantonese. I probably won’t say much that I haven’t already said here, but please read the thing anyway? The photo →

Jasmine Devils

Ah! Yam bui! Here are some of my students taking a good slurp of 鐵觀音 (tit gun yam, a famous tea) on my roof. Yes, Lantau people, there are still some morning/early afternoon slots left →

Make 2013 a Canto Year!

Have you made any New Year resolutions this year? I have. One of them is total world domination by Cantonese – while allowing the other languages to live too. Yes, that’s just the kind of →

One For The Team – Yet Another Benefit of Speaking Cantonese

This is how it started. We had dived into an upmarket restaurant because the temperature was dropping fast and it was raining; we just couldn’t bear the thought of another meal with our backs to →

The Enemy Within

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But →

Impress Your Friends, Feel In Control

Here is G with some lovely ha gau and another gau, ordered from the Chinese menu by him. Now you can also learn to navigate a Chinese menu with impunity! This Saturday, November 10th, I’m →

Oh Cradle of Cantonese – Where Did You Go?

Guangzhou has been my favourite big city in China for years, certainly after the government finished the destruction of Beijiing in the name of the sacred olympics. Two weeks ago I was there again, probably →

Swine Flu – Only Hong Kong Supports It

I’m going back to those scraggy crags today! Now you can come too. Just click on China Tours and you’re there!

Here’s a missive from 2008, just after the sacred Beijing Olympics when I finally could get a visa to China again: Not that I smoke joints anymore but I do get disillusioned sometimes about my →

I just have to post this comment from one of my students, ah Laan, here. She, as well as I and everybody who’d ever attempted to take on the Canto, has fought through being answered →

Sometimes, almost always, the below kind of conversation is funny, yes surreal. But not when I’ve spent all day on a bus full of people with, shall we say a relaxed relationship with personal hygiene →

After a quick stopover at my (visually) favourite spot in all of China, Jiayuguan Fort in Gansu province, I speeded into Xinjiang province where the language was: Nothing. The whole province has been completely shut →

This could never happen in Hong Kong. No, not some geezer talking on his mobile you berk, but sticking up in the middle of a four-lane highway with only a single traffic cone for protection. →

When the communists, soon after they came to power in 1949, introduced simplified Chinese characters, it was ostensibly to reduce illiteracy on the mainland. However, their real objective was to enable peasants and other illiterates →