Wasabi

Canton Chronicles: Tonal Errors and Nick Names

I came to Siuh Hihng with Tony and Cat, but actually a large number of people that i know from San Francisco, people that i sort of know from San Francisco, people that i don't know at all from San Francisco, and people from all over Canton were congregating in Siuh Hihng for Tony's wedding. No, not Tony and Cat's wedding, but the other Tony.

Wait, there are two Tony's? Why are there two Tony's? Doesn't this make things confusing?

With their English names, yes, but actually my dear friend Tony is more commonly referred to by his Chinese nick-name: "Ah Bun" (bun). So, in fact, he is both Tony and Ah Bun. I don't even know what is real name is. The other Tony, is known as "Ah Dan" (egg). I don't know what his real name is either. In fact, i suspect no one actually knows anybody’s real name since everyone is always calling everyone else by their nicknames. And then they often have more than one. Yes, i was often confused. Which was not aided any by the excessive drinking, and at the same time, was greatly aided by the excessive drinking.

The other major problem here, is that i am not a native Cantonese speaker, which means that i often make what are best described as tonal errors. In Cantonese there are some 6-13 tones, depending on the system that you subscribe to, so even though the English spelling and pronunciation may be the same, with each tone you have a completely different word. Native Cantonese speakers, of course, don’t think about whether or not they have their tones right, or even about the existence of tones for that matter. They just speak and it comes out right. I am _so_ jealous.

Sometimes when you make a tonal error it's just funny. That's good, i don't mind being laughed at, but sometimes it's very dangerous as it's very easy to be very insulting in Cantonese. To avoid this problem when addressing people, 90% of the time i simply use their English name said in a nice clean Californian accent. Consider business wise, travel-agency-owning Alan: A Luhn. That's okay, sounds sort of like Alan in English, but if you say "ah lun" it translates to something like "dick" which means something like "fuck head". As i was saying, a nice, clean Californian accent.

So, back to Nicknames. After about 30 minutes of drinking with the guys on the first night i received my first nickname: sam ga chut. This comes from the game “Liars Dice.” The person I was playing with called three sixes and so I raised him to three sevens which is an impossible value and thus brought everyone to tears laughing. That's "sam ga chut". Later on I got another one. I ordered a coke a one restaurant and somebody noted that my real name sounds something like “sa jeurng” (sperm killer) in Chinese, which is what they often call Coke, for some reason. So suddenly i was sa jeurng for the night, or maybe it was a couple of nights.

Canton Chronicles: Seven Star Crags

The following day Tony, Cat and i visit the local tourist attraction in Siuh Hihng: "The Seven Star Crags". These are seven ginormous rocks the jet out of the incredibly wide lake which the city of Siuh Hihng is situated around.

Canton Chronicles: Siuh Hihng

The ferry has been traveling up through the river-veins of Canton deep into the mainland while i was sleeping. We get off the boat and while Tony and Cat are arranging something i stare into the brown still water of the river below. Garbage, dirt, and i don't want to know what. The customs agents are pretty shocked to see me at first and then manage to struggle by with their school English. That's nice of them. I pretend i don't know any Cantonese (a trick i learned in Japan) and then we three foreigners fumble out of the terminal wheeling a body bag worth of luggage in each hand into the brightness of high noon.

Cat negotiates the price to our hotel with a cab driver while Tony and i survey the surroundings. The sidewalk is being replaced or something so it looks as though they have jack hammered the entire thing all the way out to the horizon. The street is cement but everything, including it, is pasted over with a tan brown makeup of dirt disguising the blemishes of it's pock marked surface. Tony brushes off a couple of cripple beggars for me. I try to make my face look as though i have done this a thousand times, but i can't deny the fact that i am effected in someway by their appearance.

"Dude, this ain't Hong Kong anymore. Now we in the real China," and then Tony and gives me lots of warnings about guarding my bag, money, travel documents, and the like.

Apparently something is agreed to and we all jam our luggage and bodies into the deep red early 1990s 4-door Jetta. What a weird choice for a cab, i wonder if it is standard issue or something.

Smog tints the entire city a golden brown haze much like August in L.A. It’s December here, but the city is pretty far south so the whether is actually quite nice, less the pollution and all. As we weave through the streets i notice that their is a left hand drive system (Hong Kong is right-hand drive) but the road is so jam-packed with schools of motorbikes, bikes, mopeds, cars, and transportation contraptions that i have not even seen before that often all of the rules just go out the window, almost literally, and if you happen to be sitting in the front seat of the vehicle it's quite a thrill to watch the oncoming traffic swerve left and right out of the way. Reminds me of some videogame i used to play at Frederick but i can't quite put my finger on it. Tony can see that i'm somewhat panicked and starts laughing at me as he makes some more comments about The Real China.

One would think that this would just cause traffic accidents left and right but later on in the trip Tony and i both noted that we hardly ever saw any kind of accident. Even a fender-bender. I guess as long as everyone follows the same rules, even if they appear insane to the outsider, if there is order, then it is safe.

We drop our stuff off at our 3-star hotel (whatever that is) which turns out to be about $12USD/night and then i have to go to a bank to convert some of my HK money to standard Chinese money. We dine for lunch at some Chinese fast food chain which has these great swing seats that hang from the ceiling (see pictures below). As we eat i watch a team of four workers replace the stones of the seating area outside and ponder Communism for a bit. I think we spend most of the rest of the day bumbling around and we end up having, what i recognize later as, a rare early night.