I love my Cantonese class - 我鍾意廣東話班

An apple for the teacher?

As I mentioned, I have been studying a proper Cantonese class through Chinese University, and I am amazed at how much I have learnt in just a few weeks. It has helped tie together all the little bits and pieces of 廣東話 that I had taught myself over the last six to eight months, and has given me a grammatical context within which to frame it all.

I feel much braver about asking for things out and about, having spent some hours now practicing boring conversations with my classmates. Today I felt able to go and ask the person staffing the desk in my building whether they had a photocopier and whether I could make some copies. Though I didn't do so perfectly fluently, of course, I could conceive of doing so, and it worked out okay, even if I couldn't totally understand the directions to the nearest copy shop!

Along the way I pick up curious bit of information about Cantonese of the sort that I enjoy. I like the way all languages, except perhaps Esperanto, have their little quirks. So at class yesterday I asked why the character for 'noon' that we'd been taught (晝 or dzau - mid flat tone) was different from the one I'd been noticing on parking signs when they say things like 'no parking 7-10 pm', which was clearly different (午). I was told by Crystal, the teacher, that the one I have seen around is the written form, whereas the one that we'd been taught is the spoken form. Okay, I can understand that, but then, if it's a spoken form, then why does it have a character to represent it? How does that work? According to Crystal, perhaps if they were writing the word 'noon' in a very informal context, such as a game show on TV, they might use the spoken form. Fair enough, but then why is it a more complicated character to write, if it's more colloquial? A little mystery that I may just let go for now, as I try and learn a more basic understanding of the language!

'Welcome to the future!'

The other day, while looking for the art gallery in Harbour City that I'd read about, I decided to check its location on what I thought was one of those standard electronic shopping centre maps.

I touched the screen and wondered why it was taking so long to load (it was probably no more than fifteen seconds, but you know how long that feels when you're waiting for something to load). Suddenly up pops a window containing a genuine customer service person, in real time, no less. I was too surprised to do anything but blurt out my question, 'Where's the art gallery?', in English, as I don't know the words for art gallery yet. In excellent English he explained where I should go, as if he were standing right there next to me. As he did, he underlined these directions by writing the name of a prominent store near the gallery, in some mysterious fashion so that it appeared across the screen in front of me, handwritten. After thanking him in Cantonese, I wandered off, and sure enough, it was just where he'd described.

The art itself was an anti-climax. I felt like I'd just seen the shape of the future, with virtual helpers popping up where you need them to give you assistance and then disappearing silently and swiftly once they are done. Of course the technology isn't quite that smooth, but it certainly felt like it was close at that moment.

Have I been watching too much 'Big Bang Theory'? Is my inner-nerd showing through?

Home?

Everything seemed to be flowering prolificly

I had the delightfully odd experience recently, of heading back to Australia, after having lived for six months in Hong Kong. It was odd because I realised that for the first time in thirty years I was arriving in Australia but not coming 'home'.
It forced me to think, as I did over a lot over the three weeks of my visit, about what constitutes 'home' and why. Some of it is pragmatic - you have a house, a room, a place of your own - and that is what makes it feel like home. Some of it is emotional - this is the place where you feel the strongest connections to people, and to the land. Some of it is practical - the place feels familiar, and you know your way around, at all sorts of levels.
Looked at like this, travelling to Australia perhaps ought to have felt like coming home, because I still have strong emotional and practical attachments to the place, even though I don't have a house there. And yet, and yet... it wasn't home, and I could feel that quite viscerally. So perhaps at its core, home is about where you have chosen to be, and want to be. For now, and for the forseeable future, Hong Kong is where I want to be, and so leaving it, even to go somewhere like Melbourne where my connections are long and deep, really did feel like being 'uprooted'.
So what did I notice that was great, or not so great, about the visit? Seeing friends was wonderful, and being 'on holiday', even a working holiday, meant it felt like I had the time and the energy to chat at length, about all sorts of things. Of necessity, given the political awareness of many of these friends, it meant catching up on the issues of the moment in Australia, which consisted mostly of; the carbon tax (let's hope!), the ban on live cattle exports (bizarre - 'we're going to kill and eat you, but we feel bad that we're doing it so brutally'), and asylum seekers (Australia's racism on display). It also meant catching up on eating 'Western food' that is hard to find in Hong Kong, like good baklava, and great artisan bread.

Swan River pea (Brachysema lanceolatum)

It has been a wet year in Australia, after ten years or more of drought, so all the native plants that I love so much were looking amazing. Everywhere I looked my favourite plants were flowering, from grevilleas, to Banksias, to the humble Hardenbergia. One of my favourites, the flame pea (Chorizema cordatum), which originates from Western Australia, was in full flower, with its arresting combination of pink and orange. It all felt like a feast for the eyes, even if I had to endure Melbourne winter weather to see much of it.
As I was studying while I was over there, I was lucky enough to find a spot in the library at Monash's peninsula campus which looked out on some beautiful gum trees, and this offered the perfect backdrop to an intense study session. It was also great to get some intellectual community while in Melbourne, and attend the Winter School at Monash, and have the chance to talk study and research related issues with other students and staff.
So there were a lot of good things about my trip - both things that I had expected to enjoy, as well as things that I hadn't. There were some things, though, that were not so good. If you've read any of this blog, you'll have realised that I love the public transport system in Hong Kong. It works so well, that travelling any other way seems like an inconvenience. So it was a shock to the system to come back to Melbourne and be reminded quite forcefully that many public transport systems do not work so well. In Hong Kong very few people run for public transport, because it comes so frequently that there is genuinely no need to do so. Why get hot and sweaty when the next train is a minute and a half away?
[.....] I wrote a couple of long paragraphs about my experiences trying to have faith in Melbourne public transport, but I decided to delete them in the interests of not sounding like a whinger. I could write a similar couple of paragraphs about my experiences driving in Melbourne, of which I also had the dubious pleasure. The latter was a reminder of how ridiculously spread out the city of Melbourne really is - even travelling on a freeway it takes a long time to get places.

Hardenbergia violacea

All of these transport experiences are a reminder of what a huge impact urban design has on a city. I hadn't realised how much I had normalised the conveniences of high density living until I came to Melbourne and realised how far away even the relatively 'close' things can be. One example will probably tell the tale very simply. Walking away from my apartment in Tsim Sha Tsui, I will usually pass two or three supermarkets within a five minute stroll in any given direction. One day in Melbourne I drove for an hour, but because most of it was on freeways or arterial roads, although I must have been within reach of many supermarkets, I didn't pass even one.  To me, those two experiences side by side speak volumes about the liveability of the walking city versus what Newman and Kenworthy would call automobility.

A blurry, but empty Northcote Plaza

On a more amusing note, when I did get to a supermarket another day, I was genuinely confounded to walk into a shopping mall and find all the shops closed. I had forgotten that 5pm was a 'normal' time for most shops to close, because I have adjusted to Hong Kong, where everything is open until ten or eleven at night, and often much later. For a moment I genuinely wondered if it was much later than I had thought, because my mind was refusing to make sense of all the shut-up shops. I did at least find the supermarket open, but it was a lone island of people amid a sea of vacated real estate.
Perhaps 'home' is actually about these everyday expectations about what happens at a station, in a shopping mall, or on the street?

Just like school...

Sadly, no photo for this, but better a post without a photo than no post at all. My new (low) ambition is to actually write something other than my thesis, however short!
So tonight was a big thrill because M. and I started an actual bona-fide Cantonese class. So instead of all my ad-hoc practice and learning from books and online lessons, I got to sit in a classroom with other students, and go back to the basics.
I loved it! My pronunciation is definitely going to improve. Our teacher, Crystal, was a very clear and consistent speaker, and was good at explaining the nuances of the mouth muscles which help shape the different sounds and tones of Cantonese. She was very quick to correct people when they were wrong, but she did it with a smile, and was very encouraging, with lots of repetitions of 好 (good) and 得 (okay) to help us along. We practised all seventeen initial consonants and the 51 final sounds of Cantonese, and repeated them all many times. Very useful, even if it felt like being back in Grade 1. M really did not enjoy this part of it. For myself, I hope I get corrected on my pronunciation every lesson for the entire course. What a thrill. M swears she is not going back, but I trust that she doesn't really mean that!
In the second half of the lesson we learnt to say, 我叫 (I'm called... My name is...) and 我係澳大利亞儿 (I am Australian, or really, I am Australia person), or whatever country you were from. I was pleasantly surprised at the diversity of the class. There was someone from Germany, France, Italy, Taiwan, Austria, Fiji, three from Japan, three from the US, and three from Australia. For sure I had learned how to say all these things already, but the endless repetition of them in a classroom situation, as well as having to say them out loud, on your own, in front of a roomful of people, really helps them stick in your mind. Bring it on!

At last...

Well, it's been a long time coming, but I finally made it to a Dragon Boat race. It's June 6th, and so it's 端午節 (Dragon boat festival), a public holiday devoted just to this event. If I was going to watch a Dragon Boat race this year, I figured it had better be today. The public holiday commemorates the sport (which is pretty ancient) as well as the story of Qu Yuan, which you can read about at the wikipedia link, if you're interested.

Now there are many different dragon boat races on today, but I wanted to go back to our old neighbourhood, and enjoy the familiarity of Tai Po. I've walked many times in Tai Po waterfront park, and figured it was as beautiful a place as any to watch some racing.

Loved all the bamboo structures

My interest in Dragon Boat racing came about because of a book that I read by two New Zealanders called "Time to eat the dog", which was an attempt to put some numbers on the environmental impact of many common activities, such as sport, keeping pets, or whatever. Their discussion of which sports had the smallest carbon footprint concluded that the best, at least out of the ones they examined, was Dragon Boat racing. Now at the time, I don't think I'd even heard of it, or at least it hadn't made much of an impression on me. Their analysis at least intrigued me enough that when we moved to Hong Kong I thought, 'I must see one of those races', and so here I was. The 271 bus provided a convenient, and uncommonly peaceful, way to get there, and the place was buzzing with people, even at 8.30am.

So what did I learn about Dragon Boat racing? Well, only what I could learn with my eyes and ears, because I didn't see any explanations of the proceedings, and I didn't understand the commentary, except for the numbers and the word Tai Po! Every dragon boat seems to have twenty rowers, ten on each side, each with an individual paddle. There is also a drummer, who keeps time up the front with a regular beat on a big drum, and an oarsperson at the back who stands up and keeps the boat heading in the right direction. I liked the way it is a mixed sex sport, as there aren't that many of these, and certainly a mixed ability one, as some of the teams were very strong and fast, while others seemed to be just happy to finish. I think this is because most, and perhaps all, of the teams are formed by local businesses, community groups, or whoever (at least one team was connected with a bar in Tai Po), and so they will all take it with varying degrees of seriousness depending on the culture and size of the organisation.

All the teams getting ready to race

I was expecting the boats themselves to be a bit more varied. I love the dragon-head prow, and dragon-tail stern, but they all seemed very similar, at least to my undiscerning eye. Perhaps there is a standard design to try and level the playing-field for the sport? One of the curious aspects of it was the difficulty in getting six to eight very long thin boats lined up at the starting line. When the wind got up a bit, many of them got blown around so that they were facing sideways, and often this seemed to necessitate one boat, and then another, paddling around in a circle to get in place again. I don't know how common this is, but certainly one race seemed to take about ten minutes before everyone was lined up to the satisfaction of the starter. Perhaps this is normal for boat races - I'm certainly not a regular visitor at any others.

One of the most startling things to me, as a newbie to Hong Kong, was the complete absence of commerce at the Dragon Boat races in Tai Po. With so many spectators, athletes, and officials, I would have assumed there would have been many small food stalls, if nothing else, and perhaps a bit of a mini-fair besides. Certainly the Tai Po district council had organised things very well, with a number of different bamboo VIP viewing platforms, plenty of portaloos (Kenny eat your heart out), a number of St John ambulance divisions, and various police, Leisure services staff, and others I couldn't identity, on duty. So where was the commerce? I mean, this is Hong Kong, where there must be more places to shop per person that anywhere in the world. And nothing?!? It was actually reassuring to have it be all about the racing, rather than anything else, though given the sticky 31°C day, I was secretly hoping for at least an ice-cream vendor. As there seems to be with many festivals here, there is a particular food associated with the Dragon Boat festival - sticky rice parcels wrapped in, I think lotus leaves. There weren't even these for sale at the racing, which would have at least fitted with the theme. Fortunately I got in early, and tried a vegetarian version of one a day or two earlier, so that I didn't miss out. I learned at Chinese New Year how fast some of these special foods can disappear, once the holiday is over, and I'm always happy to experience Hong Kong through my tastebuds, as well as my eyes and ears.

The joys of a local library

Feeling like you have settled into a place is different for different people. Probably everyone has their rituals for feeling settled, whether this is getting all your boxes unpacked, cooking a first meal, learning the names of your local streets, or perhaps finding out the best pizza place in the vicinity.

Today, M. and I went and found where our local library now is, the compact and slightly-hidden-away Tsim Sha Tsui library. In fine Hong Kong fashion, to get to this you have to go up in a lift - only one floor, mind you - but enough to remind you that Hong Kong is a vertical city. I'd like to think there are stairs somewhere, but if so, they are not easy to find. Naturally, the first thing we needed to do was to get our library cards. One of the beauties of a Hong Kong Identity Card is that it gets used as a multipurpose form of identification for all sorts of things. In a car-oriented culture like Australia, a driving licence gets used most regularly for this sort of thing, but in Hong Kong, where few people want or need to drive, the HKID is a very useful and universal form of identification.

Even better, as we found out today at the library, it can be used as our library card, due to the power of the microchip. So instead of my bag getting cluttered up with too many library cards, my HKID card can do the lot. The library staff very patiently, and with very competent English, explained which form to fill in and the correct way to insert your card in the card-reader (wait until the light stops flashing), and so we were on our way.

Best of all, this is a library that will just be for pleasure, because we are desperately in need of reading that isn't just academic. One of the great finds of today was the book above, that describes all the local neighbourhoods, in just enough detail to make them interesting, unpacking some of the history and culture that has resulted in what we see today. I did not know, for example, that until the 1960s, the Tsim Sha Tsui area was quite dominated by the (then) British military, so  that much of what has shaped this place is the requirements of the military personnel at the time. This explains, in part, why there are so many restaurants, bars, nightclubs, tailors and so on, in this area. It is the sort of detail that I would not have even thought about - TST just seemed to be that way - but naturally all places have a history and a reason behind their current existence. I suppose as the bars and restaurants sprang up, so people from other neighbourhoods were drawn here for the nightlife, and so as the military presence was withdrawn, this more 'tourist' aspect took on a life of its own. I had the funny thought as I started to read the book, 'Wow, this book is as good as Wikipedia', and then felt a bit ashamed at how Wikipedia has started to colonize my life! It is very easy to forget how much information that used to have to be searched out painstakingly is now at the tips of our fingers, quite literally.

The English language fiction section of the library is quite small, as you would expect, in a country where the first language of 97% of the people is 廣東話. On the upside, our new library membership gives us access to all forty-two (I think) branches of the Hong Kong library system, so there are bound to be quite a few books to read across all of those. And no matter how small the fiction section, it was certainly a lot more books than we had available to read at home. I was secretly pleased to see the library so well-used. All the communal tables were pretty much full, with people using them to read books, newspapers and magazines. Most of them looked like they were retired, and reminded me of one of the many things I am going to do more of when I retire. Shouldn't heaven be more like a library?

It was an interesting reminder of the local culture to see the balance of books in the social sciences section (academic curiosity). Most of the sections were pretty small, except for the sections on finances, money-management and information technology, which were pretty extensive. It is hard to miss when you come to Hong Kong that the power of money is big here. People respect money, and everyone wants to earn money. This is true of many places, I know, but in HK it is tied up as well with a lot of other religious and cultural aspects of the place that I am still only just getting a sense of. It is why the most common greeting at New Year is 恭喜發財 (which means sort-of 'Congratulations on becoming rich'). In a way that I have only seen elsewhere in the US, the myth that 'if you work hard you will prosper' seems alive and well. Given all the things I have been reading about social class and the education system in the last few months, while it may be true that all things being equal, you will do better if you work harder, for many people the harsh truth is that even working very hard brings few rewards, and for many the deck is really stacked against them.

Fresh from the glow of public education that is the library, we swung back past Crema Coffee, for a delicious espresso, with the added bonus of being able to flick through our new books. For the espresso aficionados, the latte art on M's coffee today was a swan! A lovely morning...

Oh what a bad blogger am I?

Well, it has been a long hiatus between blog posts. I hope this is not the sign of a longer term trend. That have been many reasons for this; moving apartments, no internet connection, guests visiting from overseas, and so on.
Some of it is also that I spend far too much of my time at my computer studying, and when I am done it is hard to feel like I should sit down and stare at the computer some more. As today is Sunday, I am having a (relatively) study-free day, so I can feel free to blog.
I am excited by our new place in Tsim Sha Tsui. It is small (M. worries about this), but I love it. Unlike in our previous apartment, where I felt like I had to walk too far to find anything, even in the kitchen, in our new apartment, everything is conveniently closeby. Most importantly, the storage is great, so everything that needs to be can be put away, leaving the place uncluttered and simple, which is what we like. Now if only we had tatami floors and shoji, it would be perfect! In the picture you can see the view out of our living room window, which encapsulates so many aspects of Hong Kong that I like.
There is the combination of old and new, as evidenced, in the foreground, by the grungy older building opposite, and the gleaming facade of the Miramar to the right. Looking a little further away, there is the gorgeous spread of Kowloon Park, which is going to be a favourite for morning walks, or simply getting away from the apartment for a bit of 'nature'. Looking beyond the park you can see the somewhat tacky 80s (sadly there is no wikipedia entry to confirm or deny this) facade of the Royal Pacific Hotel, beyond which is Victoria Harbour, and a splendid view of Hong Kong Island. Conveniently there is an easy walking route that cuts across the park, over a pedestrian bridge, to an attractive waterfront promenade, to make this an even more enticing option.
The park itself is one of the biggest in Hong Kong, with a wild outdoor swimming pool, bird aviary, resident flock of flamingos, regular Sunday martial arts demonstrations, and so much more. Every morning, it is incredibly well-used for tai chi practice, with individuals and groups practicing in all corners of the part, at various levels of skill. Perhaps when I get familiar enough with the twenty-four move tai chi style I am trying to learn, I can find a group that does that and join them occasionally. Given the very multicultural nature of the area (we are close to Chungking Mansions after all, as well as one of the main mosques on Kowloon-side), there will also be people doing other forms of exercise, such as yoga, although this is strictly a marginal affair compared to the tai chi practice.
For us it is such a contrast from living on the very edge of Tai Po. Now we have everything, almost literally, at our doorstep. For a chemist shop we need only walk ten metres. For a newsagents, perhaps 50 metres. Our closest supermarket is 100 metres away, although there are many in the vicinity. There are innumerable cafes and restaurants, but I am most interested in ones that serve great espresso, and for that there are at least four closeby that meet my standards - my favourite at the moment being Crema Coffee. It is a little daggy (to use an Australianism) as far as decor goes, but the coffee is excellent (they roast their own in-house) and they do a very cheap breakfast too. There is even a resident dog at certain times of the day, which keeps M. smiling. There is a Post Office just around the corner, a number of vegetarian Chinese restaurants within a two or three minute walk, and, I think, four cinemas within a five or ten minute walk of the place. I think we feel like we are in Paradise, at least as far as the convenience factor.
As those will know who have visited us, at our old place it could be quite a chore to get a taxi, mostly to explain the complexities of how to get there across the English-Cantonese barrier. At our new place the majority of the traffic that goes past our door is taxis, a little bit like in central London. I cannot imagine there would be any time, day or night, when there wouldn't be a taxi in view, though I haven't currently been awake here at 3am to test that proposition. Mind you, with dozens of buses going down Nathan road at the end of the street, the MTR nearby, and a free shuttle-service to the airport express, it is hard to know when we will really need a taxi, unless we have so much luggage that a bit of laziness appeals.
Our apartment move was actually achieved in Hong Kong style, via taxi. We thought of how little stuff we really have (given our furnished apartment) and how difficult it might be to organise movers when we didn't know where to start, and the taxi option seemed appealing. So we have made four taxi journeys down on various days, with a full load of bags/boxes and this has mostly done the trick. Given the price of taxis in Hong Kong, this was all managed surprisingly cheaply. Even better, it gave me practise in saying my new address in Cantonese.
Actually, in one of the first taxi rides down, I heard my taxi-driver talking on one of his phones to someone, and saying something that sounded oddly familiar (I am oddly fascinated by how many phones most taxi-drivers have - the most I've seen is six, all lined up in their own brackets on the dashboard). It took me a moment, but I eventually realised he was saying our street! It made me smile, because so much of the time random words and phrases that I understand in Cantonese, pop out of people's conversations around me. Unless they're saying something very simple, it is usually not enough to know what they are talking about, but it is enough to make me realise I am making some progress, however slow. Another thing that is available in our new neighbourhood, is actual lessons in the language, organised via Chinese University of Hong Kong. So that will be one of the first tasks on my list for next week...

Space to think, space to move...

I'm never quite sure what the ethics of taking photos of unsuspecting strangers is, so this photo is artfully blurred.
Just a quick post, tonight, to say that yesterday I had one of those moments when I really knew I was in a different culture. I mean, most of the time as a newcomer to Hong Kong, I live my daily life knowing that it's quite different, but mostly acting as if it's all quite familiar, because that seems to be a good way of getting through the day. I think I can only take so much novelty in any given week - I think my brain is being stretched taking it all in at the moment - so this strategy keeps me moving along without worrying too much about the detail.
Anyway, back to what I wanted to talk about. So I was on the MTR, as I am quite frequently, and about to get off the train at University station. I'd got up from my seat (yes, I actually had a seat) and gone to stand in front of the door, you know, facing it ready to get off, with my nose perhaps 30cm from the actual door. About 2 seconds before the doors actually opened, someone moved into that really rather small space between me and the door, ready to get off. Now this wasn't a bad thing. I wasn't in a hurry, and I hadn't been jostled. From my perspective, coming from Australia, this would just never have happened. Whether it is about different approaches to personal space, or whatever, I can never remember any similar thing happening to me there - it is almost literally unimaginable. As it was, in this particular instance I  didn't know what to think. If you'd asked me I would have said I was as close to the door as I would ever want or need to be, unless the train was packed, which it wasn't. And yet someone saw the space in front of me as a socially acceptable gap to stand in, ready to deboard, as our American cousins might put it. Strange.
What made it a little bit stranger was that I couldn't put it down to aberrant behaviour, as if this was some outsider, even from an HK perspective. As I'd been sitting down I'd been watching these two older women chatting across the aisle in front of me. They seemed like perfectly average women, in their late forties/early fifties, chatting about life while on their way home. And if you'd asked me to think of a profile of a person, by age/class/ethnicity/gender/whatever who might step in front of me, one of these women would have been about the last on my list of candidates. I'm not going to obsess about this much longer, but it reminded me, quite forcefully, that I truly don't understand this place, and perhaps never really will.
That's actually quite a useful lesson to have underlined every now and again, particularly given the almost negligible inconvenience or harm I suffered from it. I wonder when I'll get my next reminder....