tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18255986447522623382024-02-09T04:01:13.177+08:00An English Girl in a Chinese WorldAbout a girl who went all the way to China to learn what it means to be English, to recognise a split infinitive from a split end, the past participle from a present perfect, a tired metaphor from a broken heart, and to pick up some Cantonese cliches along the way.English Girlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04687002073498227820noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1825598644752262338.post-6398076715769427172011-03-23T21:03:00.002+08:002011-04-02T22:34:48.858+08:00Home-made Expectations<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">A rainy day in Hong Kong can resemble life in England: grey, dull and best spent morosely indoors, perhaps writing a romantic-gothic novel or, failing that, at least an epistle. Okay, I may be exaggerating a touch, but here I am, one week on, back in Hong Kong after a trip home to England and feeling not a little grey and dull myself to be between these two otherwise very beautiful and colourful, but quite different, worlds.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">All week, as I have slumbered my way though work, clutching cups of tea and coffee in an effort to over come the double jetlag and general sleep deprivation, I have had kind enquires of "How was your holiday? How was England?" – or, rather, 'the UK' as it is referred to it, thus kindly including Northern Ireland into the equation. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"Great!" comes my answer, "Wonderful! Lovely!" and "Tiring…but worth it." <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Then, “How was the weather?” <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"Cold." <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“How was the food?”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Indian.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“What was the best bit?” <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Seeing my niece.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And from those in the know, "Did the dresses fit?" But here, I should, as my Australian friend insisted when we reunited over our Thai salads and view of the fairy-lit sea, go back right to the beginning and start my story again.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Well, the week before leaving was busy. Isn't it always? At work we had people in from around the region for a conference and I was rushed of my feet trying to get things wrapped up before going away, leaving my role vacant for a whole week. (Though judging from my return they can, of course, manage perfectly - or at least, sufficiently - well without me; but we do like to give ourselves illusions of grandeur, don't we? Makes having to work for one's living seem somehow more worthwhile.) In between all this I was trying to get my head around the question of whether and, if so, what presents to take for people back home and indeed, what to pack for myself – my mum having already assured/threatened me [delete as appropriate] that there were plenty of big woolly jumpers knocking around that I could wear, so no need to pack any – as if I owned any! And of course, as if this wasn't enough, I was starting to get sick. And nervous. Oh yes, the prospect of going home was certainly raising all sorts of expectations, great (one of the books that were to accompany me on the journey, and one of many to return) - joy, bliss, showers of love and warmth and fondness... - and otherwise. The question that had suddenly dawned on me of 'What about when you have to leave?'<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Well, by Tuesday I at least felt happy that I had resolved the first problem: I would take presents only for my niece who, after all, was the person who would appreciate them most, and so I headed to the lanes off Queen's Road Central to the market stalls and Chinese touristy-fayre shops to purchase some traditional qipaos for my nearly two year old, but rather advanced, niece. The shop assistant directed me to what I wanted and left me alone to choose from among the beautifully coloured and embroidered dresses and trouser-shirt suits for little children. That is, for </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">very</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> little children. But after some rooting around I had decided on some large bright pink ones and was ready to pay, when the shop assistant asked: "For what age?" <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"Two year old," I replied, knowing that I was holding something deemed considerably larger than that, "but for a big baby...a Western baby." <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"I will get you the size," she replied, disappearing into the back for some time while I stood outside in a state of worry and dismay, knowing that she would come out with something significantly too small for my darling niece who, from Facebook photos and Skype footage I knew to have inherited the family genes and be a tall, chubby and very active toddler now - one who liked, as she had from the word go, her food second only to yours. If I hadn't seen her for over a year, I still knew that. And sure enough, five minutes later the woman emerged holding up two doll-sized outfits: very cute but certainly not big enough to squeeze my niece into. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"No, sorry, a BIG baby," I said.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"Next size up?" she replied. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"Make that two." <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Some time later I left with my roomy purchases still in a state of concern. What if they were too small? To give a child you had not seen for a year a present she could neither use nor enjoy would be heartbreaking for both of us but for the child would, I felt, be a disappointment, the momentousness of which I could still remember something about. Besides, I thought as I made my way to met a friend for dinner, the last thing I wanted to do was give the poor child a body image complex! And those articles that the shop assistant had held up were hideously small. Even at six months they wouldn't have accommodated my bonny niece. And what was more, these beautiful qipaos would after all only be used for dressing up. My sister would hardly be allowing the child to be seen, even (or, especially) on special occasions, out in these clothes. So bigger was definitely better. And yet I worried, until hoping to find reassurance from my friend, I held them up over the dinner table and realised yet, I could probably just about squeeze into them myself. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"Oh, yes, plenty of room I should think," she said, not without a faint hint of uncertainty – the kind that single women for whom thoughts of motherhood are a very long way off might express. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"Yes," I replied, examining them and looking with similar doubt down the neck of the dress to the tent-sized space within. "I’m sure they'll be ok." <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Thank heavens! They were. My niece went "oooooh" with excitement and chose the "red coak" (coat being still rather hard for her to get her mouth around) to try on first and which fitted just fine: nice and roomy. While the pink (but also red for the purposes of my niece's limited semantic range) dress was in fact a little long, almost tripping her up as she walked. Bless! Needless to say she looked very lovely and my relief was complete as she posed for a photograph and I managed not to fall at the first long-lost auntie hurdle, and after that – playing Playdough, pushing her on the swings, teaching her to say my name and other choice vocabulary and anatomy (the shape and location of one’s Playdough heart) – well, she made it all rather easy by being by being quite possible the best person I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet again. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Back in Hong Kong it is spring now. The morning mist bleaches the world-made-home, but is by afternoon burnt away to reveal a landscape seemingly artificial in its intensity, in its almost overpowering vividness of colour and form. It demands attention, but like the sun itself is blinding to look upon: a violent assertion of presence upon the eye. But by evening, when the mists have rolled in billows like smoke from the fire, it is veiled again in a haze of smog and light. Thus an elusive landscape in which city and country appear in a collusive infidelity to the image of itself, engaged in its own striptease, and the neon signs that map the night city, prostituting itself, are just as swiftly lost to sight, smudged by hot damp night air rendering the names a blur of colour. The most elusive of all, however, is not the buildings now resplendent in their sunlit finery now concealed in cloud, or the verdant peaks draped in a dewy mist, but the sky: rarely blue, and rarely glimpsed even then between the mirrors of sunlight and blue that rival for supremacy. For the sky, it seems once again this spring, has been left behind in England – a canvas on which one’s hopes are or would be pinned.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In England, in the Peak District, on a moor, on a farm, my mother lives beneath a wide-ranging blue sky. Or at least she did when I went to visit her. The sunshine was out, the snowdrops were out and the lambs were being put out of the shelter of the barn to pasture with their mothers. And I too. She lives quite deep in the country now, but a nomadic life: a few months here, a few there. She calls herself a gypsy and I fear it is becoming true. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">My mother has a van whose name is Bongo. Suitably nutty. This van, which really seems to have a life independent and of its own, happened to be in the garage while I was there, having its bodywork seen to. We stopped by one morning on our way to the local swimming pool (or baths, as we used to call it), and oh dear God!</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I waited in the courtesy car while my mum went to speak to the guy and find out from him what the damage was and how long it would take to be repaired and at what cost, etc. But after about three minutes of sitting (about my limit ordinarily but not least after having endured 13 hours straight of sitting 13,000ft up in the air) I started to get restless and fidgety. So I crane around to see where she is but can only make out the top of the guy’s hat. It is quite a remarkable hat, one of those Canadian deerstalker types with the earflaps that tie up on top. This one </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">is</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> tied up on top and, what is more, appears to be made of real deer. Well, it is cold, I concede, but it’s not artic! if you will stand around outside talking all day... A few more minutes and I’m staring at the clock. We have plenty of time, but what </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">is</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> she doing? How can this be taking so long? Finally, I see them coming towards the car and walk straight past it – </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">what?!</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> – to stand in front of the garage sign, looking and pointing up at it and continuing their conversation, which apparently now has little or nothing to do with Bongo. A few moments later and thank god! They are walking back to the car but now have stopped outside. My mum sneaks me a quick raised-eyebrow look at me which says ‘I know you’re loving this but if only you were where I am! I </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">really</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> can’t get away!’ I see my mum point at me and thank him for lending us the car, at which point he opens the door and leans in to direct himself at me with a friendly, “Oh, so you’re the daughter from…where is it again?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Hong Kong,” I reply, smiling politely but not a little embarrassedly, as if I’m declaring I’ve come from the Moon just for a little visit to see me old mam.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Hong Kong,” he repeats, somewhere between impressed and marvelling. “I’ve seen that place on telly. Buildings so tall they make your neck ache to look at, and a million people on the streets walking this way and that. Am I right?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I told him he was not wrong.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Eee, no. I don’t know how you do it. Not for me,” he says and as my mum offers up salvation in the wisdom that “it wouldn’t do for us all to be the same” he continues to tell us his life story: how he hasn’t had a day’s education but had to teach himself his trade from scratch, how he and his hawk-owl have lived poaching off the land, catching squirrels and rabbits to eat, and how he couldn’t possibly leave our little town – not for Hong Kong nor even for London thank you very much. And just as I start to think that I too will never get to see those cities ever again, but must be trapped with the badger-bating yokel-mechanic from the moors, I hear a voice say “Well, actually we’re just off swimming” and just like that he replies, “Well, I won’t keep you then,” and is wishing me a pleasant visit as we are driving quickly away in near hysterical relief.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“I bet you don’t get that in Hong Kong,” Mum smiles at me after a safe distance has been placed between us and the object of her remark.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“No,” I reply, trying to imagine how that would go down in a 7/11, at my local drycleaners or in a taxi, but finally conclude that in a city where time is money and no matter how many hours you add to the working day they still not enough, “It just wouldn’t happen.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We made it to swimming, and I won at Scrabble, and I baked a banana cake, and I chased and carried the toddlers around play areas, and I ate freshly laid eggs for breakfast, and walked through a village churchyard (hearing Blake's 'The Garden of Love' echoing off the two-hundred-year gravestones) and over grey-green fields in my old wellingtons, and fell asleep with the light on like when I was young because there was still someone else there to turn it off, and drank cups of tea one after the other.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So when they ask, how was your holiday?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Lovely, I will reply.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">How is your family?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Oh, very well. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">How was the weather? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Cold - but, I will remember, the sun shone through the chill moorland air. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">What was the best bit?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">All of it. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We [had] changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I [ - we] went on.</span></i></div>English Girlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04687002073498227820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1825598644752262338.post-47488296137262760352011-02-16T00:08:00.012+08:002011-03-30T20:20:59.568+08:00A year in love<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Travelling home on a very packed ferry yester-evening I had the uncertain privilege of being sandwiched for the 25 minute duration between, on my left, a couple </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">sitting in silence, apparently </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">on or coming home from a date; he trying to stroke her knee but succeeding only in affectionately patting the designer handbag that took pride of place there...Or, now I come to think about it, perhaps that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was</i> his true object of desire. For I have learnt, in my time observing the species of rich Hongkongers I dwell among, never to overestimate how much care and attention can be showered on a costly Louis Vuitton or Prada by both the woman who owns it and the fella who bought it; the handbag being, it seems, something synonymous to a couple’s first child before they get the dog and eventually, if they have endured those preliminaries tests, the real kids, and often even then outperforming the others in terms of affection. After all, it <i>is</i> always at and on your side, silently asserting its superiority over others without ever arguing back... Meanwhile another obstacle intervened between them. Like a privet hedge between two neighbours, sat an ostentatiously oversized bouquet of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ferrero Rocher </i>and which, it strikes me, must the perfect gift-concept for Valentines who, judging from this pair (and apart from reading my book and slurping my drink as quietly as possible so as not to spoil the romance blossoming at my elbow, what else did I have to do given our imposed proximity </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">but judge</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">?), like to kill two clichés for the price of one, and which clearly they had acquired earlier in the evening as part of the elaborate but dubiously successful, given the complete dearth of scintillating conversation sparking between them, ritualised </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">public </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">foreplay going on beside and all around me, t</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">hus forcing me back to my book.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> While to my right sat a kindly middle-aged woman who, until I pointed it out, had completely failed to register that the inordinate numbers of spruced up people parading back and forth between island eateries and forcing us to sit like sardines in a tin – instead of aphrodisiacal oysters in our own little paradisal shells – signified that it was St. Valentine's Day.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">So that was what I had to come home to after work. Joy! Oh, of course, there were red envelopes in the mailbox, a candlelit dinner waiting, followed by a hot scented bath and the bed loving strewn with rose petals…but that’s when a stray thorn burst my bubble and I realized I was in the wrong story: I was Goldilocks and this was someone else’s perfect Valentine's scenario.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But having endured the couple(s) on the ferry and having spoken with the lady who so innocently sat beside me in the midst of the Big Love In, it struck me to ask: who was having the best time that evening? They, with their glad-rags on, clutching their bunches of chocolates ready to do battle with anyone who accused them of being single, and traipsing out in the cold to go and sit with all the other couples in an overpriced restaurant; or she, who was simply pleased to have the reason for unusually heavy traffic revealed to her, and even more gratified to think what roaring trade our island’s restaurants would be doing, because, she assured me, they need the business. Clearly an economist if ever I met one! Well, after much careful consideration, I think I have to conclude, from my brief survey of the market, that the economists are winning in the happiness stakes. After all, it certainly cannot be me, a single girl. No, not I nor any of my many other single and equally ineligible friends, and especially those who have recently broken up with someone. We have no right to be happy on this day of the year, but since being in a couple does not seem to be much better – being positively coerced into buying cards, flowers, chocolates, and chocolate flowers, and made to go out with millions of other romantically expectant people to have a wonderfully romantic time at great expense… leading one to think that Alexandra Kollantai had it quite right in thinking that, as Laurie Penny put it, “the fetishisation of the bourgeois couple above all other forms of human love was the foundation of oppression of all working people” and so leaving her husband to pursue revolutionary activism - I feel I can hear her now: “Darling, I’m leaving. It’s not you, it’s Marxism” - ...I guess, we shall leave it to the capitalists to rub their hands and smile.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">And yet…being in someone else’s "just-right" fairytale home alone, does give a girl a chance to don their most outlandish, unmatching sets (plural, because Hong Kong’s just got cold again) of pyjamas, crack open the bubbly, scoff down their Cadbury's Roses and contemplate the age old question: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Is love a fancy, or a feeling?</i> Hartley Coleridge’s Sonnet VII, from which this question derives, argues against the idea of the merely conceptual or perceptual nature of Love – against its relegation, demotion or trivialisation to the realm simply of thought, feeling or imagination: fancy. Instead, the speaker argues for love as an objective correlative to experience, as something that does have existence - and even greater existence – outside of ourselves and our control; argues, in short, for love’s endurance and steadfastness, untouched by the tides that come and go, the years - the ferries - that shuttle back and forth, marking time and the beginnings and endings of love as numerous as our daily journeys. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">No</i>, he says, love it not a passing fancy: a 20 minute commute… But here, you may read it for yourself:</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Is love a fancy or a feeling? No.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It is immortal as immaculate Truth,<b></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">'Tis not a blossom shed as soon as youth,<b></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Drops from the stem of life--for it will grow,<b></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">In barren regions, where no waters flow,<b></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Nor rays of promise cheats the pensive gloom.<b></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">A darkling fire, faint hovering o'er a tomb,<b></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">That but itself and darkness nought doth show,<b></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It is my love's being yet it cannot die,<b></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Nor will it change, though all be changed beside;<b></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Though fairest beauty be no longer fair,<b></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Though vows be false, and faith itself deny,<b></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Though sharp enjoyment be a suicide,<b></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">And hope a spectre in a ruin bare.<b></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It being the season to be loverly and all, I recently came upon an article in Time Out magazine on the vexed question of the “barren regions” of romance where “all be changed beside”: that is, of the long distance relationship, or LDR as they abbreviated it to and which when you put it like that, does indeed sound like some terrible sexually-transmitted disease. Seeking to offer advice to those poor souls who find themselves in one, the article began by investigating the main problem with LDRs, which – for those of you unable to possibly imagine – was (shock horror! Knock me down with a feather!) lack of physical contact. Try as they may to remain in touch, the lands-aparted lovers are ultimately doomed by the lack of touching. Write as many letters, emails or make as many phonecalls as you like, but we all know that it is not the will of the head or heart but the oxytocin that is released when couples are intimate that makes them – at least believe themselves to be – in love: it is merely a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">feeling</i> that gives way to a (albeit chemical, neurological) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fancy</i> that is love. Nothing more. Without the feeling there is no true (oxymoronic) fantasy and no love. So, sorry Hartley, you with your romantic notions of eternities and immortalities had it all wrong: love will not grow where there is no water, no light, no air to feed it. It’s just a matter of chemistry, biology… Or is it? </span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt 262.25pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Speaking as, it seems, a girl doomed to always leave romances behind in an English world for a life as a singleton in a no less romantic Chinese one (“no, I’m not married yet,” I once had to reply to a four year old student of mine, “not since you asked me last week”) I can vouch that no, absence doesn’t always make the heart grow fonder: p</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">assions can cool and the memory forget; t</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">hat</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">yes, time does heal </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">and the endless, trivial, nonsensical but delightful things that once one had to say to the loved one can dry up, fall away or be said to another… and another.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">.. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">For, if not to touch and see and be seen, how is love different from any other passing acquaintance one might have, say, with colleagues, neighbours, fellow passengers on the way to work or the grave? Listening to Harold Jacobson on Desert Island Discs (thanks BBC, your Radio 4 airwaves colour the world a shade of pink still!) I was struck with the way in which he described his relationship with his wife. Asked whether he would survive if cast away on this imaginary desert island with nothing but his eight disc tracks, he replied very much that no, he needed company – that people, his wife not least of all, gave him his sense of self: “I need the company [of marriage], I need the support, I need to be looked at with love to be sure I’m there, maybe I need to be looked at in the beloved’s eye to see a nicer version of myself than is actually the case or than I fear might be the case…It’s as though I can’t trust my own version of myself,” he said. Scary! But perhaps at the heart of each of us is this unknown – this void – that Jacobson expresses, or as Shakespeare has Achilles say in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Troilus and Cressida</i>: the “mind is troubled, like a fountain stirred; and I myself see not the bottom of it”, the idea being that we cannot wholly know ourselves, but rather that it is other people who help us create and shape our image, like looking in a mirror. But what if we look not in a faithful mirror? A cruel or selfish lover; possessive, jealous, mean? Someone who does not reflect but imposes, who twists and distorts - a carnivalesque hall of mirrors. Couldn't that be as harmful as being left Crusoesque alone gazing deep into the dark abyss of ourselves? But to be in a loving and faithful relationship <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">can</i>, as Jacobson suggests, be creative, affirmative. It can be to have a Mirror Mirror On the Wall – a Jiminy Cricket on your shoulder, a conscience and guide telling you who is fairest of them all and whether and when it is or is not You. And, I suppose, this loving relationship need not be just with someone else... Couldn't it be with oneself? </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Is love than nothing more than a passing fancy or a feeling: the desires and impulses, racing heart and beating veins; the attendant dreams and imaginations that weave a fairytale romance about us, give our chemical-biological flutterings form, decorum and longevity in the belief in a happy ever after? Or is love as fundamental and eternal as Truth? Does it reside in the beloved, or is it merely imagined and overlaid there by the fancy of the lover? Or, a third option: is it possible that the feelings and fancies, passions and conceits – the conceit that you are here with me now, that I am talking to you – give us access to something higher, more enduring, something possibly resembling truth, that the beloved for example, might not only to reveal to us the image of ourselves but be instrumental in creating that image? Not the passive receptacle of our desires, fancies, feelings, but the maker of them through time – from here to eternity?</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Wow! But </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">what about me, I hear you ask: what loving relationship are you in? When I think of my family and friends now it is as if I must needs chart them on a map. I see where we were, where we have been, where they are now, including who they are with and where their friends and family are, where they might yet go and where I might see them</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> next.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> My relationships are a map that stretches around the globe in a way that even Columbus or Cook might be jealous of! Some dearly beloved are here, but relatively few. “Thou must needs find out new heaven and new earth,” as says Anthony in an attempt to verbalise – to declare and by declaring prove – the vast size and scale of his love for Cleopatra; and I too it sometimes seems must do the same if I were to have in one day, one life, all the people and loves I have known. But are not all modern relationships doing - and having to do - the same? Email, Skype, Facebook… When the loved one is beyond the reach of touch, they are no longer (as too they were not for the speaker of Coleridge’s Sonnet VII) quite out of sight. But do then we think of them lovingly, or only with jealousy, fear or the sadness of loss? This, Time Out claims, is the reason for LDRs’ limited success and poor reputation: without the euphoria/eudaimonia of physical presence - its reassurance - these emotional and psychological demons reign supreme.<b> </b>But why, I would cry, when our friends, family and lovers are not 'ours' to begin with do we presume to lay most claim to them when they are gone? Must they be hurting us in their absence, detracting from or diminishing us - separating us from our enjoyment of ourselves - either by their happiness or by their mutual sense of loss? No, rather, let us be reminded that they are individual, that ‘we’ – the couple, the pair of us – are divisible and if we are alone, why then, we are merely back in the place of our beginnings. Why can we not then imagine ourselves young and new again in love, free to love that person, another or simply ourselves and the world all over again? The excitement of discovery, the thrills and laughter, the feel-good of talking late into the night, or being surprised by a kiss boldly written into a message. Should not we treat all our relationships – near and far – in the same way: as a chance to court, to come out from afar and meet the other halfway? And if that relationship is romantic, then to embrace the coyness and frustrated longing that the distance imposes for that kiss, touch, sign of understanding and affirmation? </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It’s just a thought – a passing fancy, really – that out of sight doesn’t necessarily need to mean out of (your) mind, but rather in one's mind as the autonomous, charmingly individual and unique person they and you are. Did we not love first because they were different: different from others and different from ourselves? They were a looking glass seen for the first time and in which we saw ourselves anew. Do we not all secretly think (and sometimes suffer in feeling) of ourselves as different while wishing that our difference was understood by another, held within them and their hearts: that our uniqueness was perhaps not so different after all, but loved all the same - nonetheless - from a distance that does not seem far? Or, perhaps, I am just speaking for myself as a stubborn, single girl. One who knows that even when in family, friendship and in love, and perhaps then most of all, there is a need to remember who you are, who you were and who you would be, individually, and to celebrate the same in the other - first and foremost and to the very end. As immortal as immaculate Truth.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><br />
</span></div>English Girlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04687002073498227820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1825598644752262338.post-74631643673398805542011-01-29T15:48:00.004+08:002011-02-06T22:25:39.921+08:00"I don't know what you're talking about, but it sounds damn saucy"<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB">There’s a saying…no, a quote, that I would share with you. Something of a joke and it goes like this: “</span><i>Giving English to an American is like giving sex to a child. He knows it's important but he doesn't know what to do with it" - Adam Cooper (19th century)</i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><i><br />
</i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB">In my job I deal with a lot of American English, constantly correcting <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ize</i> to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ise</i> wherever I see it and doubling <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">l</i>s. However, it strikes me that the differences between American and British English are much more profound than this. I mean, I understand (and am generally quite sympathetic) when a Yank admits that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American is a bastardi<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">z</b>ed English</i> – the spelling does not make <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i> much difference – but if, for example, they were to start flattering me on my new <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pants</i> I would consider myself to be in a whole heap of trouble – not necessarily only linguistic. And I am not the only one. A recent conversation an Australian girl friend had with a Yank started off innocently enough: on the subject of long-haul flights. “Oh, I just love it,” my friend rhapsodised, “when halfway through the night Qantas bring round Magnums!” This, perfectly acceptable to me (I was nodding in jealous agreement: BA do not provide such service), was apparently met with stunned silence and raised eyebrows by the American in question. “You know,” she continued blissfully ignorant, “I love seeing those shiny wrappers appear from out the darkness. I always get so excited!” I am still in agreement: ice-cream at 2am what could be better? But clearly the American’s mind was running along other lines… Did he think Qantas provided 4.4 firearm cartridges at that hour to its sleep-deprived travellers, or enormous bottles of champagne to celebrate the midpoint on its long haul journey (“Woo hoo, we’ve made it this far without a) crashing, b) being set upon by terrorists armed with handguns and ice-cream, or c) the pilot getting blotto…oops, until now!)? No. None of the above. Magnum, in the US – for all of you who, like me, didn’t know – is a brand of prophylactic. A condom. From the Latin <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">magnus</i>, meaning <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">great</i>. Well, of course! Now it makes sense. Americans are famous for being </span> not <span lang="EN-GB">e</span>xactly shy and retiring, for being encouraged by the likes of Oprah (god love her) to ‘big’ themselves up and, as Blackadder would say, ‘blow their own trumpet’ – if you can possibly excuse the irresistible pun? </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">But of course, it works all ways and between all nations. While recently demonstrating the art of (mainly rude, it has to be said) Italian hand gestures, a friend added “but of course, it means something very different in India.” What you might use to tell someone to kindly “F* off” in Italy would, apparently, have you inviting them into your house for curry in India. “That’s quite different,” I replied, reminding myself that for every useful lesson you learn, there is always an important footnote to be added and for every rule, an exception. Personally, my difficulty with Australians has always been – again, underwear related – that they will insist on referring to their Havaianas as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">thongs.</i> “What,” I ask, “do you then call your…well, thong?” “A G-string,” they reply, in a tone that suggests that I, with my onomatopoeic flip-flops (a word bordering on the inanity of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">whoops-a-daisy</i>), am the idiot. And fair play to them, I have to admit they have that sussed, and they certainly have more call for both flip-flops and thongs in their summery climes. But, I ask them, footie and soccer aren’t the same thing in the land of Oz? In England football, footie, soccer are one and the same: a kick-out, down the park, lads and dads, the beautiful game…We’re all talking about football (EPL style). In the US and Australia, however, you have football and soccer and you are all referring to different games. But such problems, I have come to appreciate, stretch far and wide. So, in a gesture towards greater cross-cultural understanding, I have complied a – by no means exhaustive, but still quite extensive – glossary of some of the English words and phrases that may lead non-British English users into trouble or at least a state of consternation.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB">I will admit though, before we begin (because the above has so far merely been the prologue to my tale), that this is by no means intended as a guide to formal English usage. These are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> the type of phrases I would generally advise my students to use, but rather ones that growing up in my mother’s household – in which, it has to be said, Jesus did most of the sweeping, as well as the occasion weeping – I have long been acquainted with, without ever really stopping to think how completely incomprehensible or bizarre they may be to an outsider. But for a student going away to Winchester, Eton, or even the wilds of Staffordshire and the Peaks – usually on a Duke of Edinburgh weekend assault course (why else venture in the North, ie, north of Watford Gap) – they may find that, having read the following they are better prepared for the semantic hurdles and linguistic buggery that no doubt awaits when, stopping to ask for directions you are told, like my uncle, that “ee, duck, it’s agin Argos”; or a merely curious Anglophile or bemused American may I hope gain some rare glimpse of the nuances that comprise a culture… <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB">But equally, do not be surprised if this farrago of a dictionary is so full of odds, sods, and gubbins that you are left jolly well naffed off and reaching for the booze and fags. Let me reassure you, it is all much of a muchness, six of one and half a dozen of the other, that you shouldn’t let Old Uncle Tom Cobbley get your knickers in a twist but just keep your hair on and Bob’ll soon be your uncle. In which spirit: I wish you happy – nay, over the moon - reading!<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB">Well <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">me ole’ mate</b> - mate<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, </i>noun,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>friend: eg, “He’s me mate” and “Ay up mate” - let’s start at the beginning. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Ay up, how are ya me old</b>? Meaning, ‘hello good fellow.’ If I knew you very well, of course, I may also call you <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">me ole’ mucker<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, </i></b>but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. How about we start with a nice <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">cuppa</b>? Pronounced <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cup-pah</i>, noun<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">,</i> meaning <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cup of</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tea</i>, never coffee. When I was growing up tea came in cups and coffee in mugs, but that was of course back in the days before Starbucks had us all drinking hot milk (with, what’s that, a faint hint of coffee?) out of paper cups. So now you can have a cuppa coffee, but if you just say <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cuppa</i> on its own I’m afraid we‘ll assume you mean tea. But how about we make this more special? Can I offer you a <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">cream tea</b>?<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>Cream tea: not a hot creamy beverage (eg, Hong Kong style, with condensed milk) but a traditional afternoon tea set consisting of fluffy scones, jam and cream (preferably warm Cornish clotted cream) and (freshly picked, sun-ripened) strawberries if you’re lucky, washed down with lashings of hot tea (with a dash of milk). To which sumptuous offering you would of course reply <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">ta</b>:<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">expression, </i>(and about the first word my niece learnt to say, probably because she knew it won her food) meaning thanks. Well, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Cheers</b>! <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">expression</i>, a toast; also <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">thank you</i>; and as in the antiquated greeting <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what cheer</i>, now more commonly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">whatcha</i>. Now, that’s the basics sorted. Once you have got those <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">down to a T</b> - <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">expression</i>, meaning <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">perfect</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">exactly</i> (eg, you can say “it suited her down to a T”) – you will be ready to move on to the next stage: Food.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Aubergine</span></b><span lang="EN-GB">, noun : (US) eggplant; <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">courgette </b>(pron. cor-gyet), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">n</i>, (US) zucchini <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Bubble and squeak</span></b><span lang="EN-GB">, n.: not two cute children’s cartoon characters as you might be forgiven for thinking, but an English dish of left-over mashed potato with green vegetables, such as cabbage, and onion mashed in. Food of the gods or <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">fodda, </b>Old English word still used colloquially in some places, though more restricted to cattle feed and school canteen food<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Chalk and cheese, </span></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">phrase, </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">this may sound like traditional bland English fare but the point of this phrase is that it is two items that are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> recommended to be put together; it is, in fact, a phrase that means ‘two things dissimilar that don’t go together’<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Butchers, </span></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">v. </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">(Cockney rhyming slang: Butcher’s hook) look: “Give us a butchers”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Butty, </span></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">n, </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">sandwich; and <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Ploughman’s, </b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">n, </i>traditional pub sandwich of cheese and pickled onions; which might be eaten with <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">crisps</b>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">n,</i> potato chips – only wafer thin; <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">chips</b> are fried, thick potato chips. As children <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">crisp butties</i> were a definite favourite: delicious and nutritious.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Chippie, </span></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">n, </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">a fish and chip shop; not to be mistaken with the slang term for a carpenter. If crisp butties were weekend lunchtime meals, chip butties were easy Friday night dinnertime meals, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">stodgy - </b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">adj, </i>the definition of English food: filling, heavy, thick<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> – </b>enough to give you heartburn for several hours and possibly reaching for the phrase <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">had his chips</b>: to be finished/done for, eg, after accidentally choking on a carb butty and performing a tracheostomy with a fish knife, you might say he’d had his chips.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Double-decker</span></b><span lang="EN-GB">, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">n</i>, two-storey bus; also a chocolate bar with two layers – nougat and crispy cereal. Umm…double-decker…<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Drinking-up time</span></b><span lang="EN-GB">, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">n</i>, sad time of the day (used to be 11pm in England) when <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">the local – </b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">n, </i>pub or bar nearby that a person normally frequents: “I’m just going down the local” – closes<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Elevenses, </span></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">n, </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">Morning tea or coffee break – a splendiferous thing, eg, “Isn’t it time for Elevenses yet?” In many people’s vocabulary, consisting merely (like breakfast) of a <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">fag, </b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">n, </i>cigarette and coffee, but if, like me, you’re from out the shire it’s an opportunity for a second breakfast.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Indian, </span></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">noun, </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">An Indian restaurant; so if you hear “I’m going the Indian” do not be deceived that they are going to seek the wise Brahmic counsel of the only person from the vast Indian subcontinent living in their English town, but to eat an Anglicised curry at an Indian restaurant<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Yorkshire pudding</span></b><span lang="EN-GB">, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">n, </i>not a dessert; batter baked in the oven and eaten with Sunday roast. And <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">in the pudding club </b>does not mean to be a fan of the Yorkshire or indeed sweet baked goods, but is a<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>phrase<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>meaning<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> to be pregnant</i>; also<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> bun in the oven </b>and<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> up the duff<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, </i></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">eg, </i>“She’s <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">dead</b> <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">chuffed</b> she’s up the duff” – as the Angel Gabriel reported back to God on Mary’s feelings on receiving the annunciation: she very happy to be with child.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Lolly</span></b><span lang="EN-GB">, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">n, </i>boiled sweet or flavoured ice <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">on a stick</i>; from which we get <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">lollypop wo/man, </b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">n, </i>road crossing assistant, because they, at least used to, carry a big lollipop-shaped staff to stop traffic with – though, arguably, their presence standing in the middle of the road should (one hopes) serve that purpose too<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Milkfloat, </span></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">n, </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">not a delightful dairy beverage, but the slow-moving electric-motorised vehicle that used to carefully deliver bottles of fresh milk to people’s doorsteps at 4am every morning. Incidentally, growing up there was a boy in our class whose father was a milkman and for some reason that fact instilled as much quiet awe in me as if he’d revealed his dad was in Superman. It seemed that impressive, but FYI the relationship (like the milkfloat) never really got going.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Plonk, </span></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">n, </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">cheap wine, such as that one might purchase from the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">offie – </b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">abbreviation</i>, off-licence (7/11) – on the way home from the local. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB">As far as food goes, that about <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">takes the biscuit: </b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">phrase, </i>that beats everything. So, lest you’re feeling a bit <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">shagged out, </b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">adj</i>, absolutely exhausted and <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">knackered, </b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">adj, </i>tired: “I’m bloody knackered I am,” after all that food let’s retire from the dinner table into<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>the<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> drawing room</b>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">noun</i>. Let it be noted no one really uses this word anymore, but in case you are reading Austen, no, they are not all unusually into their art; rather they (the women after dinner) are ‘withdrawing’ into the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">living</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">room </i>to let the men smoke over port (“pass the port”) and politics<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. </i>I’ll let you decide who is getting the better deal.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB">And while we are on the subject of rooms, note that in English a <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">restroom </b>is a room for resting in and not a <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">toilet</b> as the Americans have it. Funny story actually on the subject of toilets, or <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">WC</b>s as they have been known in the UK for many a year (water closet – how coy!): in Hong Kong, common usage is to refer to the toilets as the bathroom which, while technically implying that one can bath, shower and shave (soak in a bubbly tub with a book and glass of wine), is I think a reasonable compromise between the American unusually prim <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rest room</i> and bizarre, out-dated British <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">water closet,</i> and is a Hong Kongism that I have become accustomed to, feeling that it reduces the embarrassment caused on all sides of having to excuse oneself in the middle of dinner by announcing “Everyone, I am going to the toilet,” from which unnecessary images inevitably follow. However, when back in the UK last year, I was in our local library which for some reason (and everyone I’ve spoken to has been of the same opinion) within ten minutes spent in there brings on the acute desire to use the toilet. Well, after many years of having to leave before deciding on which book to borrow, they have acknowledge this universal truth and installed a solution upstairs. But on asking one day for the key – for clearly this is now a sacred and well-guarded room of requirement – to the “bathroom” I received in return only looks of blank bewilderment. After repeating my request a few times in the hushed tones appropriate to a reading room, I realised the error of my ways. “Oh, I mean the toilet,” I cried out rather too loud in a combination of triumph at finally finding the linguistic key to unlock my meaning and my increasingly desperate need to get the key to unlock the toilet room. And bingo! Bob was my uncle. But have I ever found both the words “bathroom” “toilet” more embarrassing? No. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB">Time’s gathering apace and we must march on with it. So get your <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">togs on – </b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">phrase, </i>(outdoor) clothes on – as my mum would say<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">, </b>always wanting to be out walking no matter the weather or how freezing cold. ‘Put your togs on, it’s a bit parky out’ - p<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">arky,</b> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">adj, </i>chilly, cold: “Oo, it’s a bit parky out” (meaning: cold outside) – and where we’re going you’re gonna need some defences against the elements. Oh yes, we’re leaving the cossetted world of the kitchen, dining and bathing rooms behind and going out<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> on the tiles</b> – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">phrase</i>, on a night out, not to be confused with <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">on the game</b>, another phrase but referring to prostitution: “She’s on the game”<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>– where, in true English <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">pissed up</b> style <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">- pissed, </b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">v, </i>drunk, also <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">pissed up</b>; but <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">pissed off<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i></b>means angry – we may be exposed to terms of abuse and content of a sexual nature. Don’t say you’ve not been warned, you <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">muppet</b>!<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Muppet, </span></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">noun,</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> a personal favourite, meaning ‘a stupid person’; e.g. “Oi, you muppet” and “God, what a muppet”; also <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">pillock, </b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">n, </i>another great and expressive way of saying someone is an idiot, a useless or stupid person: “You’re a right pillock”; and <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">wally</b>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> n, </i>an idiot, someone so dumb he doesn’t even know how dumb he is. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Berk, </span></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">n, </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">(Cockney rhyming slang: Berkeley Hunt) an undesirable person, e.g. “That George Bush, he’s a bit of a berk!” <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Daft</span></b><span lang="EN-GB">, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">adj, </i>foolish; as in the phrase ‘Daft as a brush’ or the rhyme my mother used to sing: “You’re daft, you’re potty, you’re made of treacle toffee” because that’s not silly mummy! Note that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">daft</i> is less offensive than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">berk</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pillock</i> – just because the ‘k’ sound in English is harder while the ‘ft’ which is so<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ft.</i> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br />
</i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Naff</span></b><span lang="EN-GB">,<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">adj, </i>means untrendy or uncool; but <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">naff off</b>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> phrase, </i>means <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘</i>go away’ and was apparently coined by one of my favourite TV programmes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Porridge</i> (meaning, jail-time). <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB">But these can’t really be considered swearwords. They are often playful or mocking – the English being quite a fan of sarcasm and curses the world over (none less than in Cantonese) tending to be quite … colourful. Nice examples of English sarcasm include <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">pigs might fly, </b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">phrase, </i>a way to say that something is absurd: “Oh yeah, and pigs might fly”, meaning that whatever it is won’t happen. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Queer as a clockwork orange, </b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">phrase, </i>means<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> strange</i>: “Ee, thou art as queer as a clock orange” (says he), and another adjectival simile (we love them!) would be to tell someone they’re <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">as much use as a chocolate teapot<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, </i></b>meaning not very useful at all. Fun! If these don’t quite cover it though – if you’ve really <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">taken umbrage</b> (offense) to something; if you’ve got the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">hump </b>– not least, perhaps by now, with the English language in which one word can have at least three different meanings: 1) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">noun, </i>ridge in the road, lump on a camel’s back; 2) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">verb,</i> to carry something heavy: “I’ve been humping it around all day,” 3) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">phrase </i><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">get the hump<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, </i></b>meaning ‘to get annoyed’ as in, a distempered camel; and 3) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">verb</i>, as a euphemism for sex – then you might want to step it up a grade, with expletives. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Bloody hell</span></b><span lang="EN-GB"> (pron. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blud-ee ell</i>), expression: an (mild) expletive, expressing surprise or astonishment, perhaps as when you’ve just <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">come a cropper</b> – a<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>phrase meaning<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>had an accident or something’s ended badly. “Cor blimey, I wor crossing the road when this truck came r’ait at me, and I nearly come a cropper!” In such an instance you might add, “I wor jolly cross I was.” In which case <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">jolly, </b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">adverb, </i>means <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">very</i> – not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">happy. </i>If you <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are</i> jolly cross, you may well be said to be <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">in a paddy. </b>Another phrase which also means to be angry; and like a paddy field, you can be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in</i> one or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">have</i> one: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">have a paddy,</b> eg, Every Saturday my little sister (Lord bless her!) would have a paddy in Woolworths if she didn’t get a new Barbie. Yup. And then a smack-bottom, which was the cheaper option.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>If someone is having a paddy, you might be tempted (but it is generally not advisable) to say: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">keep your hair on, </b>or <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">don’t get your knickers in a twist</b>, two phrases<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>that<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>are<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>aimed at calming someone in a temper down but which usually have the opposite effect.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Keep your pecker up </b>is another cute but annoying phrase<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>used<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>to encourage or cheer someone up; to which you may want to reply (well, bugger off – but also possibly) <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">cobblers</b>!<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>As a noun, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cobblers<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></i>(Cockney rhyming slang: Cobbler’s awl) means testicles, but as an expression it implies <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nonsense</i> or “What a load of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">codwallop</b>!” <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB">Another charming euphemism for the male member (not to be confused with honourable members of parliament, though some would say they are just a lot of d*cks too) – as the English would rather not name It if we can avoid It, not when they are so many potentially ridiculous (excuse the pun again) alternatives – is<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> goolies</b>, eg, “Aw ref’, he got me in me goolies.” Sounds rather like a race of Enid Blyton characters doesn’t it? <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Bum</b> meanwhile can be used to mean <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">borrow</i>, eg, “Can I bum a fag?” and <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">randy</b> is an<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>adjective for<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> horny</i>, hence why the English find Americans with the name Randy so frightfully amusing.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i></b> <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Bob-a-job </b>may sound like a euphemism but is simply phrase from back in the days of shillings and pence and means doing a job to raise funds, which I suppose could be appropriate to much of the trade that takes place with ladies of the night in Wan Chai but usually applies more innocently to boy scouts or unemployed window-cleaners. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB">Moving swiftly on, leaving the obscurities of the night behind and relegating all such ambiguities to drunken dreams and alcoholic amnesia, all that leaves us is to deal with is – appropriately enough – the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">gubbins</b>:<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> noun, </i>collection of general worthless items. A personal favourite, thanks mainly to the pronounced (in the senses of regular, strongly emphasised and articulated) use my mother always made of this word. Whenever anything needed cleaning, moving or removing it was referred to as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">gubbins</i> - “What’s this gubbins?” – usually followed, if referring to our clothes, by the interrogation “Clean, dirty or indifferent?” If it was indifferent gubbins, we usually went to school wearing – ie, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">covered</i> in – it the next day. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Odds and sods </span></b><span lang="EN-GB">is another choice<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>phrase of my mother’s meaning odds and ends, bits and bobs; or in other words, a random collection of stuff. As you’ve probably gathered from this collection of English words so far, references to homosexuality and acts of buggery feature quite highly in spoken English language<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>(I don’t know if odds and sods has this derivation, but…) – a possible reflection of a culture steeped the contradictions of public school fagging and imprisoning gay playwrights? Perhaps it is as my mother would say “Well, there’s two choices” (or more in this day and age, mother) and that, whatever the question the answer you can be sure is, it’s <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">six of one and half a dozen of the other<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. </i></b>Growing up this phrase was the stock answer aimed at my sister’s and my protestations and mutual accusations that “she started it!” “Oh,” my mother would exclaim, “you’re as bad as each other; it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other,” usually followed swiftly by “I’ll knock your silly heads together” which had more effect than the seeming incomprehensible mathematic equation, until finally one day – probably around the time of revising for GCSE Maths – I figured it out. Eureka! And, feeling like I’d outsmarted my mother, declared “But they’re the same thing!” to which her reply was “of course,” not seeming to realise then that all those years her homey wisdom had therefore quite failed to reach home. But it’s all <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">swings and roundabouts</b>, as they say,<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>another phrase<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>meaning that<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>it’s all about the same, along with <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">much of a muchness, </b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">phrase, </i>recently made familiar by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice in Wonderland</i>, also meaning <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">equivalent to</i>. Does the preponderance of these synonymous phrases suggest something drab in England and Englishness? That like our food, you cannot tell life apart – one weary day from the next, one grey sky from another, one monotonous street, park, tree or bird? Does it represent apathy or, does it perhaps say something positive about our culture as one of liberal tolerance – that we have so many queers, odds, sods, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Old Uncle Tom Cobbley and all </b>(another old (and odd) saying long conveyed to me through my mother’s love of idioms<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>and which<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>is an exhaustive way of expressing ‘and all this/these/those as well’, basically meaning <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">etcetera</i>)? Or is it that having watched a once rich empire fall away and been beaten for years at our own sporting games, we are now left mere to stand, gazing on with resigned detachment before turning away in search of our pipe and slippers, to make a hot cocoa and mumble the quick prayer “It’s all much of a muchness” before falling back to sleep? </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB">So, is <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Bob your uncle</b>? <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Phrase, </i>is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">everything complete</i>? </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Yes, I am felicitous to reveal that </span></span><b><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 12px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 12px; font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I have terminated </span></span></o:p></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 16px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">my pre-meditated </span></span><b><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 12px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 12px; font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">categorisation of the more esoteric vocabulary of our</span></span></o:p></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 12px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 12px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> demotic</span></span><b><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 12px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 12px; font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px;"><b><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 12px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 12px; font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">post-Norman tongue. C'est fini. Merci.</span></span></o:p></span></b></span></span></o:p></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 19px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 19px; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br />
</div>English Girlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04687002073498227820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1825598644752262338.post-76729129512569711862011-01-17T23:28:00.007+08:002011-02-13T10:45:26.111+08:00Words apart"Apart your legs."<br />
<br />
Now, I would have it known that I would not normally be so obliging as to comply with this command for just anyone, but for my yoga teacher Maya, yes. It is in part, the economy of the phrase - its succinctness - that makes it so endearing, as much her humility and quiet humanity that it emanates from. Why should "apart" not be a verb here when it makes perfect sense? We all know exactly what she means: "Pull your legs apart" or "Spread your legs." Either way, we - her pupils - are so in awe of the ease with which she demonstrates the correct position and the not small discomfort that our own efforts are producing that the grammar seems ...well, unimportant. How could one possibly correct someone so superiorly physically strong and flexible? Should not our English (in a Chinese world) be as accommodating - not to mention creative - as her limbs?<br />
<br />
Well, I fear it is just such liberal ethical linguistic gymnastics that are getting me into trouble at work! After all, in my new job as English Editor I am expected to fly the flag for imperialist English usage and to halt the tide of American-Chinglish. And in many ways I am in complete agreement: we cannot have so many 'convenient stores' in Hong Kong as we do 'convenience stores'...<br />
<br />
However, as a wee slip of a gweilo girl it is not always easy being the one to lay down the law of English letters to burping Cantonese men and assert that to 'ise' is better than to 'ize' but that you should never, no matter how bad it gets, 'hospitalise'. And, besides, I have to admit that often the literati in me just dies hard and sometimes there <i>is</i> poetry in the oddness of a phrase. I mean, it's not quite Shakespeare, there can be ugliness and redundancy too, don't mistake me: often there are frequently too many unnecessarily repetitive words repeated without need so that any sense that started out in the sentence soon got lost in an explosion of bubbling metaphors all racing frantically at once for the finish line only to spawn afresh, double quick off the blocks! But, where does the line in the sand lie? When does incorrect equate to economical sense and when incoherency? How ugly and how poetic?<br />
<br />
Well, I was left wondering - nay, marvelling - at some of the startlingly beautiful turns of phrase in my recent reading of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's <i>Love in the Time of Cholera </i>(in translation, of course), which as anyone who's had to endure me tell will know that I found to be one of the most delightful, charming and witty reads I've had in a while. While others have said - from the blurb on the back, the title on the front, or an attempt to get between those two covers by more than a few pages - "oh, how depressing" before casting it aside, I found it lively, engaging and rather funny. In places, of course, elsewhere, otherwise, yes, it is as the title describes, about unrequited love during the years of cholera and begins, pretty much, with two deaths. But then, I did inherit my great grandmother's dark sense of humour. She was the sort who'd laugh herself into stitches when someone fell over, and who kept a Minor Bird for the wicked impersonations it performed of her gossipy neighbours, keeping her entertained for hours after they'd left. Yes, I'm afraid I'm one of those. Though I know I am not alone. Just this weekend, as my friend and I were racing about the MTR trying desperately to get to the cinema on time, we passed a couple in the station on the travelator who, as it came to an end, had completely failed to pick up all two-dozen of their shopping bags in time and found themselves too suddenly helpless to stop the chaos that was ensuing. As they looked on at the wreckage piling up about their feet, my friend and I took one look at each other, burst out laughing, and carried on running on our way, thanking our lucky stars that in our lateness we had been given that classic comedy moment unfolding in real time, as if just for our entertainment.<br />
<br />
And you might say "Aren't you a yogi, do you not believe in karma and all that?" But I would say that you are missing the point. The more important question, Dear Reader, is what in GGM could possibly be comparable to a golden travelator pile-up moment in the MTR? To which I would reply, "You mean apart from a man dying falling off a ladder trying to get a talking parrot out of a mango tree?" Well, if that doesn't intrigue you or raise even a smile, then you should stop reading here, for nothing of interest can possibly lie in anything I will go on to say. For the rest of you, I refer you to the part in the novel in which Florentino Ariza (because characters are always referred to my their full name, as if we've not been following them for 200 pages already and cannot possibly distinguish them from all the other characters who share their names), the unrequited lover of some 30 years, enters one of his poems in the Poetic Festival and watches as Fermina Daza, the object of his long-time frustrated love, reveals the winner on the stage of the National Theatre to a packed and equally expectant audience. While Florentino is imagining the honour of winning, of having <i>her</i> read his name off the card inside that golden envelop and the desire it would necessarily inspire in her for him, the actual winner - in a moment of true bathos - is a Chinese immigrant who comes up onto the stage, beaming with pride amid the boos and jeers of a xenophobic audience who cannot believe that this minority person could possibly have written "a perfect sonnet in the purest Parnassian tradition that revealed the involvement of a master hand." So not only does the reader have the pleasure of seeing Florentino's amorous fancies thwarted once again, but also the pleasure of the unlikely winner triumphing over a prejudiced society.<br />
<br />
Yet, before I mislead you into thinking that this is a straightforwardly heartwarming story of right over racism, we need to return to our thesis in hand ask "Ok, but where's the humour?" Well, remember I'm an editor (as well as literature nerd), and believe me, the devil lies in the detail, in the position of a comma, apostrophe - a single letter, or phoneme - that changes "Sit down" into "Shit down", a "flatted factory" into a "fatted factory", "a good year for investment" into "a good ear for investment" and the list goes on, including my personal favourite "de horse" when the writer clearly meant "divorce". So, if the position of a letter or two accidentally out of place can change the meaning so much, just think what a word purposefully so-placed can do, inflecting our entire world with the nuances it sheds. So, here is what GGM had to say that made me smile - because, after all, <i>he</i> <i>said</i> <i>it</i>, and would any way say it much better than I could ever rely - in the cause of exploiting prejudice to explode it. And since they say that the surest way to mar a joke is to explain it - that if you have to the joke is lost - I will take the risk nad avoid doing that. I would of course try to reassure you that if it <i>is</i> lost on you, well, you never had it to begin with, so don't feel bad; but if you get it, well, just know that someone - equally mischievous - is also smiling with you.<br />
<br />
<i>No one believed that the author was the Chinese who received the prize. At the end of the last century, fleeing the scourge of yellow fever that devastated Panama during the construction of the railroad between the two oceans, he had arrived along with many others who stayed here until they died, living in Chinese, reproducing in Chinese, and looking so much alike that no one could tell one from the other. At first there were no more than ten, some of them with their wives and children and edible dogs, but in a few years four narrow streets in the slums along the port were overflowing with other, unexpected Chinese, who came into the country without leaving a trace in the customs records....</i>English Girlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04687002073498227820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1825598644752262338.post-8772403478440976972010-12-29T21:34:00.002+08:002011-01-29T09:01:50.644+08:00On the first day of Christmas, HK meant to me...<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;">On Christmas morning, I am usually – or, at least, have traditionally been – woken up by my younger sister coming to lie on top of me and staring into my face until my eyes open straight into hers. Scary, but as her warm body snuggles under the covers next to mine, or bounces off to check on the progress of tea and toast up from the kitchen, not altogether unpleasant. Of course in recent years, the desire just to sleep has replaced the excitement of getting out of bed and rushing downstairs to open presents and get stuck into a bag of chocolate coins; but this year, without even my sister to answer my Scrooge-like “What day is this?” I woke up to the terrifying thought that surely I must be late for work, swiftly followed by “Where am I?” and the dawning realization that I <i>was</i> home and <i>in</i> bed and very hungover.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"></div><div class="MsoNormal">Note the clothes strewn on the bed, quick check to make sure my purse had come home with me and into the kitchen to make peanut butter and banana on toast (as I hear this is good for these eventualities) and tea, the memories of the night before start to fall into place.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It had begun sensibly enough when, meeting my friend after work, we'd taken my cold Gingerbread Latte on a walk through IFC mall to see the Christmas displays and get some cheesy photos of ourselves in front of them, only to be met by a huge crowd that had assembled to watch what can only be described as a Toy Story-esqe Christmas Panto, replete with prince and princess, fairy godmother, Santa Clause and a troop of shiny green US army-style soldiers, who would've been actually quite terrifying (think: the PLA wrapped in green cellophane) but that their feet were strapped to boogie-boards, reducing their movements to forward and backward jumps. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As we watched on from two storeys above discussing dinner options and raging against the machinations of evil (for me, ex-)employers, purple and green lycra leotarded trapeze artists performed balancing, swinging and catching movements and an English and Cantonese commentary blared out, doing really very little to reveal its significance to the plot of the play unfolding before us. But it was amusing. And many photos of the enormous, twinkling Christmas tree later, as the acrobats walked off ‘backstage’ - but seen by us from above - in flip flops, with only the Prince keeping up the illusion by gallantly taking aloft the hand of his Princess to escort her away, we too departed in search of food and that first, oh so good and oh so innocent merry glass of wine.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Two hours later, fed and 'watered' we could be found getting stuck into the mulled wine in the small and intimate SoHo institution that is Joyce is Not Here. The host was, as we found out within minutes of arriving, there in body but very much elsewhere in spirit: ‘homeland’ spirits as it turned out, as shot after shot of highly flammable brew was handed round to the party and downed. By midnight we were ready for dancing – well on our way, as they say. Only, and this is where the record of the evening breaks down, I seem to remember tequila – that oh so traditionally festive of drinks – entering into the equation, followed fairly quickly by the desire to sleep and the conveyance, by the joint efforts of a kindly onlooker and a taxi, of myself to my ferry and then somehow home. Now, I must stress, that oblivion is a state I rarely – if ever in my previous follies – reach. I used to know where the limit was (and it was normally at the sobering thought of paying 9 Great British Pounds for a shot of inebriating cactus juice), and pass my drinks over to less witting subjects while I danced me and my liver back to the realms of sobriety on Evian. Ah, for the return of those good old days, when Joyce was ostensibly not there, and nor were forty-eight hour working weeks to severely reduce an English girl’s tolerance to alcohol or her willpower to say no. <i>Mo-ah.</i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Now it must be distinctly understood or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate: I didn’t used to drink myself into such a state of unconsciousness. But awaking on Christmas morning, (after apparently attempting to brush my teeth in bed, for how else did the toothpaste get there? and dental hygiene is important...), I felt glad to be alive, glad to have made it home, glad to be still in one-piece (more or less) and in bed, falling in and out of sleep to Radio 4 (Myra Syal playing Shirley Valentine), and enormously glad to finally hear from my friend that no, after I had left she had not jumped off the balcony of Azure (located on approx. the 35-floor) as tempted in her likewise drunken state, or drowned catching a sampan home to her own outlying island, or choked while vomiting, but was - and here I attempted to raise my head and sidle out of bed – on her way over for Christmas dinner, as arranged.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The weather was grey, drizzly and windy. It could almost have been England, except that of course, England is seeing picturesque white snow these days and, at least, if you are one of those phoning in to 'You and Yours', complaining about it bitterly. But the weather in Hong Kong was grey: mild, but with the wind whipping round my building, tempestuous. The perfect weather for the meeting of two morose, slightly shamefaced (though in good company not so for long) ghosts of Christmas Eve party people past: a scene from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Withnail</i>, minus the lecherous gay uncle. Needing ingredients for dinner, I dragged my poor, dazed companion into the Park ‘n Shop (a curious name really when you think about it, for no one in Hong Kong ever <i>drives</i> to the supermarket!) – the thought of festive fayre still having the power to turn a delicate stomach and overwhelm a troubled mind - the video store and mercifully back home. It had felt like a Krypton Factor challenge, but I think I started to sober up over the cooking. Thinking carefully about what to chop, wok and boil first, what quantities are required to feed not one but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">two</i> people, and trying to avoid knocking myself out on the corner of the cupboard door – at first about as perplexing as tackling a rubik's cube – had, in the end, quite an absorbing, therapeutic effect. Either that, or it was the quantities of Perrier being imbibed in between all the laughter; my sous-chef also squeezed into my small kitchen, by this time bobbing around with nervous energy (whether at the thought of my cooking, or coming down off the hangover, I’m not quite sure though).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But what, you will say, were you making? Turkey, roast potatoes and parsnips, carrots, sprouts, peas, and stuffing with maybe a few yorkshire puddings (which, I am proud to say my students now know is not a sweet dish but a large savory kind of puffed up pancake)?? No. Of course not. Are you joking?! As I explained to my friend when she oooed and aahhed over the sight of my oven, we don’t use that. “It’s gas,” as I explained, “and to light it I have to turn the gas on and stick your head in with a match and…”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Sylvia Plath.”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Quite. People think she killed herself, but she was in fact just trying to light her oven. If she’d had a Hong Kong one, the result would’ve been worse. She would have blown up in flames. Allow me to demonstrate,” I said, in my best Blue Peter voice. At which I did not stick my head in the oven with a lit match – that would have been stupid – but merely turned the gas on the stove and ignited the ring. At which, as per usual, a god almighty flame erupted large enough to BBQ a large turkey in a matter of minutes. “It’s quite powerful,” I explained.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“So I see,” she replied, "it could have your eyebrows off." </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I sternly reminded her that her job was to stand guard over Health and Safety, and continued with my chopping. With the stove now lit though we were making progress, and slowly, carefully, with much presence of forethought, into my wok went: oil, garlic, ginger, chillies (just three, because I have a habit of making things too hot), eggplant (or aubergines if we are being English about this very unEnglish Christmas dinner), capsicum (or bell-peppers), broccoli and flowering-cabbage, spinach, lentils and pumpkin. The perfect hangover veggie curry! </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Well, okay, it’s very non-traditional for Christmas Day, but it injected some much needed wholesomeness to an abused body and with those three fierce and fiery chillies it certainly was warming! The Woody Allen film meanwhile was sort of lost on us a little, but as the evening drew to a close and I was left alone to Skype with my family, I felt it had not been a bad day all in all. My 21 month old niece was of course the star of the show: terribly happy showing me her new chalks and making herself at home in her Playmobile kitchen (which to be honest I was rather jealous of, being better-equipped and almost larger than my own) while the rest were in the throes of their various dinners, one sister cooking for her own little family, and another treating mum to dinner at the pub. But I, eight hours ahead, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I</i> was going to sleep, at what felt like long last. Very content. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>English Girlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04687002073498227820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1825598644752262338.post-47719255308082090012010-12-22T23:59:00.002+08:002011-02-06T22:32:08.855+08:00Warming Christmas spiritsWell Christmas is now upon us, and here in Hong Kong the sun is still shining. It did turn cold. For a day. At which quilted jackets came out, heaters went on and half way through the night I found my knees hugged tight to my chest and the thought passing through my head that a trip to Ikea would be necessary to purchase another duvet. Yes, temporary insanity had set in. Thankfully, that passed in a matter of days, and we are (probably, again temporarily) back to something resembling an Indian Summer with Christmas seeming merely a theatrical that everyone is just playing along with. Myself, putting up fairy lights finally this week, included.<br />
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Yes, while my compatriots back home are railing against grounded planes, cancelled trains and unseasonably(!) frozen rains, I am finding myself in conversation with other expats and Eurasians that complain of the inconvenience of a sunny Christmas: "It just doesn't feel like Christmas without the cold and the snow!" Quite. What would Christmas be without the coughs and the colds endured though the shopping and the spending and the wrapping? The eating (which, if you're anything like me is more out of a sudden and positive desire just to have a layer of fat between you and the elements that bite!), and the impending doom of post-dinner dieting? Without <i>The Sound of Music</i> for the 25th consecutive year, and the even worse alternative being offered on the other channel? And that feeling when it's all over and someone, clapping their hands together, saying "Well, that's it for another year" that makes you want to cry out "noooo!" Yes, where would we be without the cold and the snow? Where would Christmas be?<br />
<br />
Well, I for one would and am right here, wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas, whatever and wherever that may be....English Girlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04687002073498227820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1825598644752262338.post-38467402668703602052010-12-12T21:28:00.000+08:002010-12-12T21:28:58.389+08:00An English Girl in a Corporate WorldWhen young Jonathan asked what job I was leaving him to go and take up, I did my best to explain: "Well.. you know how I correct your homework? And you know how every week there are the same mistakes all over again? Yes? Well, this is what I'll be doing, only for grown ups." Having just finished my first week in said job, I can say that that was a pretty accurate description. Now, instead of working with one Jonathan and making sure he doesn't swear, I work for about 200 Jonathans making sure they don't make equally heinous crimes. Yes, I am the new and only in-house English Editor for a large property agent. Or, as occasionally introduced by my boss, "the new English teacher." Same difference I guess.<br />
<br />
The first week went well, I think. I got up at some unnatural (but apparently not illegal) hour, took the ferry with a million other yawning, coffee-clutching suited people and returned each day some twelve hours later by the same route. On my first day, I was happily met by my new boss, other co-workers and shown my new desk in my new - bright, naturally lit! - office overlooking Victoria Harbour (all good so far); introduced to the kinds of English letters I would be reading: dull and incomprehensible (so no fear of giving away trade secrets: I simply don't understand what I am reading); and taken out for lunch. Twice. Very nice. On this same day I was also given the onerous task of writing the new Who's Who of senior management, and the imminent deadline for that; and told that I had arrived just in time to make the Christmas party and Professional 7s corporate event on Sunday, and that I would need a Las Vegas/Moulin Rouge costume for the former and to 'volunteer' to help with the latter. So, the week passed quickly in giving equal attention to both researching my new big bosses and a suitable outfit for the party.<br />
<br />
Once I had sourced some fishnets and a corset (thanks largely to H&M's surprisingly slutty line of clothes for this holiday season), the Christmas party/Annual Dinner, hosted in the grand ballroom of one of HK's finest hotels, was set to be a fun affair; and in true Hong Kong style, the fancy dress was amazing, with pirates, decks of cards, tableau vivant, mafia gangsters, etc, etc. There was glitz and ritz and celebrity oozing from the enormous centre stage as awards and prizes were given out throughout the eight course Chinese banquet, served by an army of dedicated waiters, and - the piece de resistance - a talent show in which, of course, Lady Gaga featured heavily. By this time though - and I don't know whether it was the wine or the steady accumulation of early mornings, or both - I was beginning to feel like I was an audience member to some surreal Japanese quiz show. Was it the gold, sparkling jackets and top hats; the giant lottery tombola and substantial cash prizes; the embarrassed/ bemused/ overwhelmed faces of the 'contestants' and winners smiling for the cameras (oh yes, the whole event was being filmed and projected on to four large screens on each wall of ballroom); the fact that all the above was going on in (just) Cantonese by this time, or was my own very English reserve/ ironic detachment/ wry humour bursting through the corsetry? Well, whatever it was, as the show came to an end and gave way to the awkward dancing of a minority and the exodus of the vast majority I knew, with the fourth Gaga song to be played back-to-back that it was time for this little English person to find her bed.<br />
<br />
So, shortly after midnight, there I was, very happily settled with a cup of tea and infinitely pleased that I didn't have to get up for work in the morning - but, as it turned out some 6 hours later, not sufficiently mindful to turn off my alarm. (Aiya!) So off it went, and again this morning when I had to get up and haul myself over to Stanley to stand in a gale of English mist and drizzle (perfect for the rugby, but not for 'nesh' old me!) with my other young, keen-to-impress or just hard-done-by colleagues and do my bit for my new parent company with the sincere, not-a-touch-of-English-ironic hope that one day - may be not next year, maybe not even the year after - I too will be rewarded, for all my long hours of hard work and sacrifice, with a substantial cash prize, weighty shining plaque and awkward smiling photo with the CEO.<br />
<br />
Or, I could just be English and not bother?English Girlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04687002073498227820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1825598644752262338.post-25810740758373014152010-11-30T18:12:00.005+08:002010-12-22T23:15:44.955+08:00The Importance of the Arts. Discuss.<div style="text-align: justify;">Recently I set a student an essay on 'The Importance of the Arts.' What can I say: it was the 60th minute, I needed to finish and start my next class, she was desperate for homework. "I'm Chinese, come on!" she joked coyly. We'd just finished reviewing an essay she'd written on the stereotype of the straight-A* maths/music genius Chinese student in which she'd argued for its unfairness: "we are hard-working because of that image; we are not all natural geniuses." And I must say, from my experience with a particularly dim-witted 13 year old boy, I had to agree with her; and on the basis of a few 16 year old boys currently established in some of our top English schools, I'd go so far as to say that you are not even all hard-working. While many are both diligent and bright, the majority of my students are simply hard-worked; a concept that is, I think, alien to children in most English schools. <i>I </i>certainly do not remember staying up til 4am to finish an assignment or prepare for a test. In fact, if the homework was 'revise' then this seemed - as the audible sigh that went out from the class suggested - a licence to do nothing at all. But mine is not an example I encourage my students to follow. So in that spirit I'd come up - off the top of my head (of which Freud would probably have a lot to say) - with the homework essay in question. And quickly forgot all about it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Times;">Well, as my mum would say, what you give out only returns to you, as was witnessed when my student returned to class on Saturday bearing the essay. I read it. It was sensible, predictable. It wasn't wrong but yet it managed to stir me out of my "I've only one week left in this job" ennui to come out fighting against the idea that the importance of the arts is that they are educational, instructive, edifying; that music and literature has lessons to teach us and the power to change the world. Is this so very bad, you might ask? Is this a terrible ambition to have as a poet, painter, dancer or musician? That something you might do, say or create should make a difference to the way people and society live their lives? No, I would answer. Not at all. I was once that a young person with ideals and ethics, who would nurse a dormouse back to health or adopt a killer whale to keep it off the streets, to save it from a life prostituting itself in front of crowds at SeaWorld. So demeaning! <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Once</i> upon a time I would have stridently boycotted Gap because I’d read they used sweatshops and would have forgone buying Shreddies because they are made by Nestle. I used to endure 24 hour famines to raise money for World Vision, lying delirious on the floor at 8pm staring up at the ceiling, trying to resist the urge to break fast on the entire contents of the bread bin. Oh, yes, I once wanted to change the world, make it a better place... But did I ever think that writing a book would do it? No. </span>Gullible as I was, I believed my uncle - not unknown for his jests and pranks but in fact infamous in those there parts for goth-rock and magic tricks - when he told me I'd have to become Supreme Grand Ruler of the Universe (with him as my assistant, of course, in charge of some satellite orbiting my own administrative - not imperial, you understand - planet) if we were to sufficiently change reality to reflect our own childish ideals. That is, if we really wanted a world in which muesli just <i>came</i> with the right quantities of raisins, summer the right amount of sun and water for hosepipes and bees (but no wasps), and Christmas Eve the best falling snow; a world in which you wouldn't be made to eat all your greens before being allowed dessert for the seemingly illogical and insensitive reason that there were children starving in Africa - the image of which is enough to put most sensitive children off their dinner, and perhaps in more wayward young minds to encourage xenophobia and racial hatred; and in which at the back of everyone's wardrobe is a little fawn who'd take you for tea and crumpets when you just needed Out. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Times;">Well, as I was saying, I was once this moralistic, idealistic girl. But now? Well, I still don’t shop at Gap but for the less altruistic and more practical reasons that a) size zero's been eliminated, either out of concern or jealousy I'm not sure, but I don't think making us naked from the waist down is going to help, and b) there are none in Hong Kong despite my now aged blue sweater assuring me – or mocking me, more like – that it was “Made in Macau.” (Is b) because of a)??)</span> My killer whale though <i>is</i>, I believe, still at large out there somewhere, freely swimming the oceans and living off my mum's credit card (I send her a cheque once every now and again to keep things sweet), but as you can see mine is a long-distance style of parenting. I've never visited her straits and she's unlikely to enter mine.<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Times;"> And while I would still love to find a forest of magical creatures at the back of my wardrobe, I am less enamoured with the ones I actually find there, fluttering around and eating what is left of my prized, now almost vintage, Topshop clothes (that shop too is not to be found in HK), and install anti-moth devices to try and chase them away, back out into the world where in my view they belong. When the change occurred, I am not certain, but </span>I guess it was quite some time ago and perhaps around the same time that I realized I would not become Supreme Grand Ruler of the Modern Universe.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>And yes, before you say anything, it was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">before</i> I entered an Oxford college reknowned for churning out almost as many Prime Ministers as underpaid English teachers. But – as I say – it was even longer ago than that that I knew I would not change the world by writing a book about it. In fact, honestly, I don’t think the idea ever would have occurred to me even in those terms. It would’ve seemed ridiculous. The point of literature, for my younger self, was not to learn how to bring about existential, physical or societal transformation. I was not reading Einstein, Engels or Oprah after all. It was simply to forget the world, leave it behind. Even reading <i>Little Women, </i>the point had never been educational. As far as my sisters and I were concerned, Meg, Jo/Beth (for we could never agree which one I was - Beth dies after all, so that was hardly fair or nice) and Amy had stolen from us, not visa versa. No, to read a book was precisely and purposefully to have nothing to do reality.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Times;">“What are you doing?” was an ordinary and not infrequent question at home as I was growing up, usually shouted from one end of the house to the other. We did have stairs in our house, don’t get me wrong, but the problem was rather that there were too many and we resented having to use them, feeling that the power of our lungs should be better exhausted in shouting. “Where are you and what are you doing?” And the answer might well be: “I’m reading.” That was a permissible answer and it could, sometimes (at least, with more authority than TV), get you off the hook of having to do anything else. Reading, from an early age I realized, was then a thing in itself and not just a means to an end. What was more it was an activity that you engaged in while at the same time being completely inactive and in which you could be both there and not there all at the same time. To me it seemed ideal, the lazy person’s dream, to go somewhere – anywhere you wanted – without actually having to move! And if I was reading I wasn’t <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">obliged</i> to do anything else, be it help tidy the house or change the world, and this only got better as I got older. The bigger the book, the more archaic the language (“Are you sure you’re supposed to read that?” I will forever remember my dear mother saying as she looked in dismay at a book of Middle English verse, “It’s not just a test, you know, to see how stupid you are?” Oh, it was a test alright, but one I would pass by learning to read it, not by concluding it was illegible, not proper English and so nothing to do with me, thank you very much!) and abstruse the content, the more I could be sure I’d be left alone to read it. “Yes, you read your book dear. [<i>Aside</i>] Just don’t make me read it when you’re finished. Please dear god, no.” For it - whether <i>To the Lighthouse </i>or<i> The Faerie Queene</i> -clearly had nothing to do with the world whatsoever, but it seemed to keep me occupied - albeit ungainfully employed - and it didn’t make any noise or mess so I was left to get on with it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Times;">This, however, brings me to the second objection I had to my student’s thesis that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">literature and the arts are important because they help to change the world. </i>What do we think books are? Shoemaker’s elves and fairy godmothers? The paperback equivalents to the invention of the wheel or the discovery of penicillin? My books seemed to everyone around me to be keeping me engaged in relatively good, safe practices. I may not have been exactly contributing to society by working on a cure for cancer, but I had potential: “Ah, so…you’re gonna be an English teacher?” they would suggest hopefully, to which I would turn a withering look of disdain upon them and reply with the single word “No.” Oh the irony! But I can’t really blame them for getting this idea. To look at me you would not really think me capable of causing much trouble by my sedentary pursuits: so studious, so… specky. Well, while I maintain that the books at least that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I</i> read never changed the world – never single-handedly abolished slavery or emancipated women, brought about civil liberties for gays or ended totalitarianism – they did bring about a change in the way I saw the world. I may have been putting my eyes out reading into the wee hours of the morning, but I was having my eyes opened to the personal experiences, visions and language of characters and writers beyond the scope and comprehension of my bedroom window. Can I say that I have learnt about the world from the books I’ve read? Or about human nature? Umm, only that it’s varied. Can I say that I’ve read books that’ve changed the world? <i>1984</i>, my student suggested. No, are you kidding?! If the literature – which still speaks ‘volumes’ (though in characters that seem like a sick joke to most sensible people) across 700 plus years – is anything to go by, the world </span>seems to continue more or less as it always has. Great works have been written, of course they have, but would the world be any different had they not? Apples and angels fell to earth before Newton figured out why and seem determined to continue to do so now (though if I were them I'd be tempted not to out of spite). But if the world hasn't been changed, can I at least say that literature has changed or shaped my "little world of man": the way that I see, experience and interact with it? Is that a rhetorical question?!<i> </i>As I said to my student, in what I hope was a heart-raising moment of astounding oratorical fireworks and not just literary nihilism: I have learnt little of use about the world from my years of reading. (Or when I did, witness <i>A Journal of the Plague Years - </i>thank you Mr Defoe - it was most disheartening.) I have, however, experienced other worlds, lived through many fictional lives and been audience to, as Austen says, "the greatest powers of the mind... the liveliest effusions of wit and humour," all written in the richest medium, the best chosen language. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">And, if that is not enough, perhaps I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">have </i>learnt something after all: not to try and write a book that’d change the world. The world, flaws and all, is fine as it is: it necessitates all the other, unreal ones we choose to escape into - gives meaning to the fawn in the wardrobe.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div>English Girlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04687002073498227820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1825598644752262338.post-32512211791017376762010-11-22T00:31:00.003+08:002010-11-23T21:43:09.705+08:00A cold foretold and a humbug for Christmas<div class="MsoNormal">You may be forgiven for thinking that this English girl has fallen of the face of the Net and died. The truth is not too far from that. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">On Monday last I was struck down in 24* broad sunshine with a cold virus the likes of which only Hong Kong, it seems, can foster. Now, I do not wish to name names, but... I blame Erin. A chatty Common Entrance 13+ who arrived at our 11 o’clock lesson the Saturday before chatting less than usual from behind a green surgical mask. And I tried to keep my distance, but it appears the damage had already been done - had perhaps been written in the stars. For, waking up several hours earlier with nausea-inducing shock at the alarm, I had been fighting the desire to sleep my way through the morning when Erin arrived. The promise of coffee hovered before me like a mirage, seemingly moving ever further away the closer I came to it, until finally 1pm and salvation in a Pret coffee that, mainlined, saw me safely through the afternoon and to the point at which I could crawl back under the duvet, from which slumberous grave I have surfaced only occasionally since and then in fittingly zombie-like mode. Diagnosis: the real-life equivalent of Man Flu; a particularly virulent strain of common cold which mixed in the right doses with panadol, Diet Coke, near fatal quantities of grapes and Stieg Larsson, has seen me day-dreaming deliriously through teaching all week. Oh yes. For, somewhere between Heathrow and HK - at some indeterminate point, possibly while drifting finally into dreamy unconsciousness over Kazakhstan - tolerance to Sick Days is hijacked and every incoming expat is issued with ineffectual prescriptions for over the counter drugs, made to don surgical face masks that leave you resembling an extra from <i>28 Days Later </i>and told to carry on about your business regardless of wishing just to be left to sleep and sneeze and blow your nose in private instead of, like my student when she returned yesterday (minus the mask) being obliged to excuse yourself, cough up phlegm into the nearest obliging receptacle, while thoughtfully suggesting that "you might not want to look in there." Aiya! So, from behind my own regulation green face mask - which let me tell you does nothing to prevent the spread of germs, rather force you to hyperventilate over your own, but which <i>does</i> act as a very good sign for “Don’t F*ck With Me, I’m Sick” and, adequately pepped up on meds, gives one delusions of ER grandeur – I have spent the week being subjected to interminably long, dark hours creatively writing students' coursework (which I understand is most immoral and which, certainly in this case, may have serious repercussions - namely along the lines of "What on earth were you smoking when you wrote this?!"), tutored on the illusory nature of love and the delusions inspired by literature (subjects that in my drugged up state I felt somehow over-qualified to lecture on) and tried to explain to one charming student why swearing in school entrance exams is inadvisable: "Jonathan, you cannot use 'bull.' It's an abbreviated swear word." "Bullsh*t." "That's right, but don't swear." </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">All in a week's malingering work.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It was in among these dreams of walking to and from work, through IFC mall and past the large shining skyscraper housing innumerable offices and my local Pacific Coffee [pron. <i>par-sif-ic Ca-fay</i>] that I noticed the arrival of Christmas. A thousand beautiful white lights adorning the trees and public space in front of The Centre: lights hanging above the entry way and from the vast ceiling, garish poinsettias lining the escalators and, slowly coming into sight like a heaven-sent revelation, a fibre-optic tree the size and scale of which designed to make your heart skip a beat. (Oh, and an enormous plastic replica of a Victorian toy rocking horse which was attracting rather puzzled looks from passers by.) Well, seeing all this my heart certainly did miss a beat, but whether out of pleasure or panic is unclear. As I drifted in a daze through IFC I felt the need to reach out, stop someone and ask "What day is this?" Had I done a Scrooge and missed five whole weeks - the end of November and majority of December - to wake up to find that it was Christmas Day already? This magical wonderland of ....well, no, not quite snow. This is Hong Kong after all and it might be mid November but the sun is still shining, only with (contrary to the wishes of the director in <i>Lost in Translation</i>) a little <i>less intensity </i>than before. I may have been wrapped up like an Eskimo (sorry, Inuit), but this was more in protest to the air conditioning than the outside temperature, which was in fact serving as a pleasant reminder of why, even in my current state, I was glad that I chose - back in those first freezing months of the year amid scenes of snowy chaos - to return to more tropical climes. What was a cold compared to the raging cold of an English bleak midwinter? But herein lies the puzzle. Why does HK seem to 'do' Christmas with <i>more intensity </i>than England where it is a much more important - nay, necessary - and even for some religious, holiday? Is it that the traditions of their some-time colonisers have lived on after they/we did? Is it out of exuberance to embrace all Western holidays that HK welcomes Christmas with the same gusto that it does Halloween and with the same terrifying effect? Or is it more sinister than that? Many have considered the over commericialisation of the holidays to be mere opiates for an over-worked masses. Those eggnog lattes, the intoxicating scent of so many fir-trees (shipped only Mao knows how many miles!) and the mind-numbing holiday muzak that is, as I write, being piped through the palaces and arcades of consumer worship are then purely state-sponsored economic rituals designed to keep businesses booming and the proletariat spending, and then working to pay off their spending. But if this is true, shouldn't we all practise a bit of the old "Bah Humbug" Scrooge? Should we not rise up in political counter point to precisely those values that Scrooge himself stood for - money-making and greed - and say "No, I shall not give in; I shall not spend; I shall not sup at thy red latte cup!"? For if not that, then what does that old tale teach us? Where is the real heart of the holidays?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Well, I grant you, the lights <i>are</i> twinkly, the festive red cups adorned with white snowflakes and filled with hot nutmeg and cinnamon milk <i>do</i> make a welcome change to anything iced, and Christmas stockings walking the streets with true Hong Kong sartorial panache <i>are</i> a glad sight. So I guess I don't make a very natural Scrooge, but the <i>music</i>? To encourage children to sing Christmas carols in mid-November: is not this a form of abuse - if not of them then of us who must endure it, must quell our inner grump and put on a smiling face and tell them "very nice" in the dear hope that they will stop? So, Scrooge, yes. A Christmas carol? Please, not yet, no.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But in all seriousness, apart from the off-key singing of precocious lil Britney wannabes, perhaps what saddens me in all this preparatory festivity the most is that - aged and cynical as I am - I know that with such build up to the time of great excitement and unthinkable happiness and joy, the holiday will be over too soon. Those thousands of poinsettias will be taken away and the decorations down, the red cups will gradually fade away and the reindeer jumper pass out of circulation because Christmas has, very distinctly, a sell by date. It is one day, or three days off work (if you are lucky). In taking Christmas out of storage so early, are we not tempting it to go off long before we are? Will not that the excitement - for, yes, I think it <i>was</i> childish excitement that I felt at seeing those first lights - have already dwindled and faded, and will I not wish I was home in England far from the glitzy/kitschy lights of the city? Will not I long simply for real cold weather, snowflakes that actually fall from the sky and the necessity of warming one's hands by an open fire or around a cup stove-mulled wine? Snowed in with nothing but UHT milk and last year's leftover Christmas pudding (the question of who ate the centre of the Terry's Chocolate Orange but a distant memory), wrapped up in one of my mother's hand-knitted scarves and playing scrabble; my dyslexic-poetic family and I? Perhaps this is why Christmas in Hong Kong can have the effect of feeling more hollow than a plastic replica Victorian tin rocking horse. Not simply is there not the bitter, icy cold and long dark days of England, but there lacks the warmth and solidity for me of hearth and home - the reassurance of a tradition that if it saw a life-size horse it'd know what was meant by it.<br />
<br />
I say this not to moan or lament though; only to answer those people who ask "Are you going home for the holidays?" that, no, I will be here, wearing my Christmas cardi with a due sense of irony, fondly listening in to King's College carols and sipping my latte in the sun while a Chinese santa and his obscenely dressed tai-tai (the one day of the year she works, apparently) hand out presents to the kids on the beach. And I will think warmly of you all back home unwrapping with delight your tin rocking horses and soldiers, sitting round the fire, chestnuts roasting as you listen to the Queen's speech on the wireless, sip at your sherry and remark on how fast the snow comes down roundabout -<br />
<br />
"So deep!"<br />
<br />
"So crisp!"<br />
<br />
"And even."<br />
<br />
And I will be glad that <i>you</i> at least have escaped the hackneyed cliches and tired epithets and can enjoy a very Merry Christmas. Because the rest of it is quite possibly, as Jonathan would say, all a load of bull.</div>English Girlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04687002073498227820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1825598644752262338.post-31153574424250811502010-11-05T23:14:00.001+08:002011-04-21T20:45:11.118+08:00Not always easy (un)being an English teacherIt was a few moments before I noticed today that one of my students was nodding off in class. The reason? I had clearly nearly fallen asleep myself. Not because the reading wasn't good. In fact, it was wonderfully lyrical and magically funny; chosen especially for 'Rainbow,' my bright and sunny sweet sixteen year old student. No. Rather, it was 3:30pm, the hour at which, after lunch, eyelids frequently nod and blink and the phrase (called up from my own childhood schooling) comes to mind: "Okay, now children, heads on desks." But, alas, no such luck. I dismissed Rainbow - much to her relief - and settled down to the next student: a laconic twelve year old boy who's seen about as much of me as he wishes and no longer feels the imperative to work hard, and who - as I pop a sour cola candy in, in an effort to wake the hell up - I too am losing the energy to motivate.<br />
<br />
For, on Tuesday I handed in my notice: the final countdown has begun. Three weeks and three days of work to go.<br />
<br />
But this is not all happy making. As I said goodbye to The Boy this afternoon, I welcomed in a favourite thirteen year old - very much this teacher's pet, and in this case a pet chipmunk, named as she is after a famous cartoon one, the only mercy being that her parents deigned to change the ending to feminine: Alvina. So, as I welcomed in the Chipmunk - cheeky, sardonic, dreadfully intelligent but rather bored and weary with the world already - I finally woke up as the memories returned to answer my own questions of "did I give you any homework? to read more of <i>Northanger Abbey</i>? how wonderful! How did you like it? how far did you get? Tilney? really..." and so on. There is nothing like a good ironist - and who better than Austen? - to brighten up ones day, and the Chipmunk enjoying and coming alive at all her jokes...<i> "Novels? Novels! Who reads novels?!"</i> We, darling Chipmunk, do and this is why, because the novel is not only the work of the greatest mind demonstrating the deepest knowledge of human nature, but it is done so with wit and humour and in that shining medium, the English language! No? Yes. Ta da! (Rabbit out of hat moment)<br />
<br />
Yep, and now I'm tired again, and hungry and you may go. "Just be sure to do your homework!" as she dawdles out, enthusiasm once again spent for the week; back to being the sardonic chipmunk she is most familiar with. But don't worry my little chipmunk, I won't tell your secret; not if you don't tell mine: I'm leaving teaching. Leaving Austen, <i>Northanger Abbey</i>, Orwell and <i>1984</i>. Leaving you, and the Rainbow; the boys that say nothing, and the boys that stare blankly as you attempt to penetrate the stoney wall of their passivity or indifference (to poetry?! to literature?!). Leaving the girls that gossip and giggle, and the girls that roll in, roll up their sleeves and bare their hearts and souls on the page and poem. And the little boy who once a week for an hour understands nothing but says "Ok" regardless.<br />
<br />
And I am glad to be going, yea glad to leave you all...except you, and you, and possibly you. Because while my bosses may make me miserable, you (and usually a Pacific Coffee flat white) redeem the day with your impromptu swear words ("crap!") - <i>Jonathan! </i>("oh, crap!"), and your cheeky grin, and the way you apologise profusely for being late<i> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">while lamenting that your life is over at the tender age of 9, which if I was really as hard on you as your grammar warranted it would be, but alas... </span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">So, while I </span>am<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> leaving and while, no, (I think to myself) I will not be seeing you at Christmas when you come home from Winchester, Wycombe or Westminster, I hope your next English teacher isn't too hard on you and doesn't berate you too much, or curse me for never giving you quite enough homework but for making you read books and stories and poems instead; to know personification from polysemy, anaphora from asyndeton, and for teaching you the importance of rhyme over rules and the imagination over the imperative. Yes, I hope they are kind on you, that they nod and smile secretly to themselves and acknowledge that you are just children: wonderfully, miraculously "of the Devil's party" without always knowing it.</span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></i>English Girlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04687002073498227820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1825598644752262338.post-51084017306072098322010-10-27T22:45:00.000+08:002010-10-27T22:45:56.786+08:00Student reports: the art of euphemismAs a child I remember enjoying the beginnings of Roald Dahl's books the most. Preferring the prologue to the tale, I suppose, marked me out from earlier on as Chaucerian in my literary tastes. However, it was one book's beginning that I delighted over most, reading and re-reading it many times and marvelling at what I saw even then as its truth. It was <i>Matilda</i>, and the passage in question the expose on teachers' school reports: the moment at which the teachers enact their revenge by revealing just what Mummy's little darling is really like!<br />
<br />
Perhaps it was because I considered myself to be a clever child and star pupil that I enjoyed Dahl's devious portraits of those less charming children that populate any and every school classroom. Like Matilda herself, I spent most of my time precociously reading, and could therefore think myself exempt from his, or my teacher's, opprobrium. I was in on the joke, sharing it with Dahl; I was not the butt of his jokes, surely?<br />
<br />
Well, now I can look back and say I know better - know, in short, the whole despicably wonderful truth. For while the reports themselves, kept safe by my loving mother (like so many locks of hair, baby teeth, photographs and birthday cards), testify that I was a mature and helpful child, as a teacher myself I now understand their true nature and meaning. No, sadly, they are not oracles sent from Delphi bearing the tragic truth about your child; nor are they (to stay on the Sophocles theme) the key to the riddle of the Sphinx. They do not aim at truth, nor can they administer wise council on how precisely to turn your toad of a child into an Oxbridge-bound angel (or even, incestuous king). Far from it. As I look back simply on my younger self, I can see clearly that the appellation 'mature' - given with such alarming frequency to my six year old self - was really a mask for the whole range, surely, of less comfortable qualities spanning sensible, unsociably shy, and awkward with a sniff of superiority. What is more, as I labour through the writing of countless reports on my own students, I see the necessity for writing such spuriously glowing reports. <br />
<br />
And it is not only I who encounter this difficulty. I was recently asked by my friend, a Spanish Tutor, how she could possibly render into nice English "she is all the time not listening." Hum, I replied, thinking for a minute. "Sophia would benefit from paying more attention in class?" "Ooh, I like it," she laughed with mischievous glee, quickly writing it down. "Tell me more." Well, just for you and any other bemused teachers out there needing a quick fix to the troublesome task of not telling the truth in their student reports, here is<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><i>The Art of Euphemism: Volume One</i></div><i><br />
</i><br />
1. Omission: avoid comment<br />
<br />
Remember the old adage "if you have nothing nice to say do not say anything at all"? This should be the first rule. Focus instead on Hard Facts, for example: <i>This term was spent revising the past tense.</i> Meaning: "Your child failed to understand it the first time, so we were forced to do it again." <i>Vocabulary</i>: "Christ, are you <i>sure</i> your child knows English?"<br />
It does, however, leave a problem: what to put in criticism's place.<br />
<br />
2. Embellish<br />
<br />
Find a small detail and elaborate: <i>Daisy participates in class.</i> The definition of "participates" might be "to show up less than half an hour late," but it's a start. Likewise: <i>Edgar responds well to the reading passages</i>, meaning "he reads them aloud when forced." Then:<br />
<br />
3. Make helpful suggestions<br />
<br />
<i>Daisy could benefit if she participated more actively in class:</i> "If she just said <i>something</i> - anything at all! - it would at least break up the hour's silence."<br />
<i>Ling Ling should revise the work done in class to make effective progress: </i>"One hour a week will never be enough to penetrate the depths of her ignorance."<br />
<i>Edgar should now work on putting emphasis into his spoken English</i>: "His monotone reading frequently sends me into a coma from which I fear I will one day never emerge."<br />
<br />
However, Daisy's case is perhaps better than the alternative, which leads us on to the next point:<br />
<br />
3. Give praise<br />
<br />
<i>Flora shows much confidence in speaking in class</i>. In other words, "Flora can't keep her mouth shut."<br />
<i>Sing Sing gives insightful readings of the poetry studied</i>: "How he arrives at these interpretations is a mystery. It cannot be from understanding the actual words."<br />
<i>Easter takes careful notes in class</i>: "I am worried she has OCD. Have you seen the size of her handwriting? It takes her hours to form a sentence, and even then its so small I can't read it!"<br />
<br />
4. Make <i>more</i> helpful suggestions<br />
<br />
<i>Flora should seek to channel her abundant thoughts into her writing</i> i.e. "keep them to herself."<br />
<i>Watching English-American films could help advance Apple's vocabulary</i>: "I really can't be the one to keep explaining the Facts of Life to her."<br />
<br />
5. If all else fails, resort to 1.English Girlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04687002073498227820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1825598644752262338.post-5483953397602764322010-10-22T23:56:00.000+08:002010-10-22T23:56:21.970+08:00Ah me, sad hours seem long!It has been a particularly long and slow week, not least as I waited on news from various job interviews and for myself to finally make up my mind on that pros/cons list. But I can now reveal conclusively that [fanfare]: The List does <i>not</i> help one decide. No. It only makes clear what the choices are, but the difficulty of Decision remains. To demonstrate this, let me refer you to the maxim of my dear beloved mother, which is as equally unhelpful as my List(s): "Well," she will sigh wisely, "there are Two Choices: you either Do or you Don't."<br />
<br />
Quite.<br />
<br />
Well, I Do. Or, I Did. Or, rather, I <i>have</i> decided to take an offer of employment and shall, as soon as the paperwork is done, be handing in my resignation. And it cannot come too soon. For today, like yesterday and the day before that, and all those dusty days preceding, have left me weary - bored, nay, intellectually starved, but nonetheless weary. Even Queen Mab could hardly raise my spirits today: I gave up trying to explain love's illusions, telling myself he's 16, he'll find out soon enough; and even my young student's impromptu expletives held less of a shock than they used. In short: my work-life lacks lustre.<br />
<br />
Indeed, I find myself, as I stand at the water-cooler refilling my cup (which, ostensibly, does not runneth over) for the tenth time, gazing forlornly at the packet of dried baby crabs that have been sitting for a week now on the reception desk for the benefit of peckish passers-by, and feel a strange sense of sympathy. I look at them with their little limbs cracking and breaking off like crisps at the bottom of the bag and see so many lives stopped still: no longer scuttling forward, or even sideways or backwards, they have been rendered lame, awaiting a final annihilation when they will be made a snack to a hungry student. For I too am their snack - a water trough at which they drink, quenching their thirst but draining the source - and I too feel just as lifeless, just as broken and hollow inside.<br />
<br />
Well, I am of course, melodramatising! (Or, at least, (she sobs dramatically) I wish I was.) My students are all as delightful as ever. They have not changed: one comes in telling me of his success in Tonbridge and Oundle interviews; another laments the typhoon's failure to reek destruction on the city and give him a day off school; and they are bright, sparky and interested young things, and I shall miss them. But, ah, the chance - some days - to miss teaching them! But now that day is soon approaching. I am waiting with bated breath for the go ahead from my new employers to kiss my old ones goodbye, to hand in my resignation and enter pastures new. No longer will I be English teacher extraordinaire - tiny crusty crab to so many hungry mouths - but... Ah, no: I shall hold out on you yet. Call it superstition - call it absolute fear of everything going bosoms up and me having to remain in my halogen prison forever: glossing "If the assassination could trammel up the consequence and catch with surcease success..." til I know not where the murderous-minded Macbeth ends and I begin, or defending his lady-wife once again from the charge of monstrosity, all the while rubbing my own boss'-bloodspotted hands and fearing that any day they will uncover his dewy corpse where it lies (under his desk, covered in dried seaweed)...<br />
<br />
Yes, call it fear, but I shall not tell. Not just yet anyway. Soon enough, this tired teacher shall be saying goodbye, escaping (hopefully, still - just about) with what is left of her sanity in tact and using her powers for good, not evil.<br />
<br />
Though, of course, she is preparing herself for all hell to break loose the moment that she announces that she is. Eek. Better watch this space.English Girlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04687002073498227820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1825598644752262338.post-15863867813628106462010-10-17T16:34:00.000+08:002010-10-17T16:34:09.430+08:00Public holidays and personal journeysYesterday saw another public holiday. In my view they are both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, Hong Kong has significantly more public holidays than the UK but, on the other, this is in an effort to compensate for longer working hours. While in England it is almost guaranteed to rain on a bank hol', here at least the sun may shine but it is the inundation of people that one has to cope with. So either way, it seems, it is best to stay indoors, safely and soundly sleeping the day away in bed. However, I generally end up working. For two reasons. First, that I never seem to know when a public holiday is coming up. This is, perhaps, due to their relative frequency. It is not, like Christmas on the Western calendar, a singular, one time event, a holiday that, coming only once a year, casts its long shadow over the over 51 weeks. Inescapable. No, public holidays in Hong Kong are rather like the esoteric minibuses that hurtle single-mindedly through the streets: identifiable only by those initiated into the meaning of their mystical numbers, while their destinations and stops remain a mystery to all else. A form of life not to be trifled with. So I feel about public holidays. They are a local phenomenon that, as an expat, I had best ignore and, as a tutor, (Reason Number Two) I can always rely on at least one eager student (or normal their eager parents) wishing to continue their studies through the holidays. (I have taught on Boxing Day before now, and let me tell you, the attempt to completely erase it from one's consciousness doesn't particularly succeed in making that drab day feel much better. Though, sunshine and 12* does!) So, when I find myself ambushed by the sudden arrival of public holiday, like a portal springing open before me into another world tingling with the promise of liberation and unknown adventure yet mixed with a mild anxiety and apathy of what to do with it and where to go, I lay down my arms. But with the promise held out that the time will come when these accumulated public holidays will be spent consecutively lounging on an empty beach in Bali on my own private hoiday with no bugger about.<br />
<br />
It is a dream that is yet to materialise.<br />
<div><br />
</div>So, yesterday was a holiday. It was also a Saturday, so I'm not sure how that works (except that the 11 o'clock search for coffee was rendered more than usually desperate by the closure of all the Pacific Coffee shops in the area, thus forcing a caffeine-deprived teacher to trek further abroad to the nearest accommodating Starbucks - the only time in which the latter has trumped the former, in my humble opinion), and I found myself being rudely awoken by the alarm clock and taking the ferry to Central amidst groups of ecstatically happy-campers all off to start their adventures for the half-term week. I told myself not to complain: only two poor students to teach and then, come 1 o'clock, freedom. And today, as evidence that I am after all becoming a seasoned expat, I had prepared myself, knowing that this moment would come when I would step out of work and into the yawning gulf of Time Off and even looking forward to it (though, perhaps more a symptom of the ennui setting in at work, as I stare down the barrel of the coming two week inundation of returning students and think longingly of the moment - now imminent - when I shall hand in my resignation and leave my small white booth forever!). So, with a slight skip in my step, I headed straight off in the direction of the MTR to Admiralty to join the crowds in the shopping mall and cinema to see a film that I was alone among my friends of wanting to see: Elizabeth Gilbert's book turned movie <i>Eat, Pray, Love, </i>or as one of its detractors described it, the one in which Julia Roberts 'flounces' around Italy. Well, it was all and everything I wanted: the original Pretty Woman (still managing to get away with dating 20-somethings in films without looking like a cougar), glimpses of Europe and sumptuous, carbohydratious (which really should be a correct adjective) Italian cuisine, a lot of soul-searching and a dubious happy-romantic ending. And it got me thinking ...<br />
<br />
Do you remember the beginning of <i>Middlemarch</i>? The prelude in which she talks about the young St. Theresa of Avila, walking out hand-in-hand with her brother, to seek martyrdom? Where she speaks of Theresa's "passionate, ideal nature" not being content merely with the stuff of romance novels and "social conquests" but demanding "an epic life" of its own: "..some illimitable satisfaction, some object that would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self"? Yes, I knew you'd remember it. Well, this is what the film (forgive me, I haven't read Gilbert's book) led me to think about: why the story of a woman forced on a painful (and of course, cinematically picturesque!) journey of self-discovery seems to speak (at least to other women) universal? Is it, as Eliot says, that there have been many such Theresas who have felt and wanted so much and "w<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">ith dim lights and tangled circumstance tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement"? Who like Julia Roberts' character, Liz, have poured themselves into their relationships, children or work, but who despite their efforts</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;"> never yet seemed to have found their object - their epic: only "a life of mistakes" in which<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> "their struggles seem," not least to themselves, "mere inconsistency and formlessness"? I know I have witnessed this sense of failure and lack of fulfilment in the women around me: sisters, friends, myself. Is Theresa's epic longing, then, the archetype of female experience? Is the frustration and sense of loss that Eliot describes an inevitable consequence of women's desire to, in modern parlance, "have it all"? A somewhat depressing picture, but it is certainly the crisis point at which Gilbert's self/character finds herself.</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">When we meet Liz at the beginning of the film her friend has just had a baby and we are led to think that it is this that she wants, that her sense of dissatisfaction and her misgivings about her husband are biological and maternal: <i>will he be a good father? does he even want children?</i> However, it soon becomes apparent that the box that Liz keeps under her bed harbours not illicitly bought baby clothes for that anticipated happy arrival but travels books on Bali. Hers, then, is not the commonly conceived yearning of clock-ticking, broody womanhood, not the desire to participate in Life by giving birth to it, but something more abstract, something nameless and unknown - perhaps it is what Eliot refers to as a "vague ideal." An ideal perhaps of happiness, completion and fulfilment and something which many women, happy mothers or wives, may too find themselves at a loss for. For, as her friend points out, having children is like getting a tattoo on your face: "you have to be committed," for it is going to change you outwardly, and inwardly, but is not necessarily going to beautify what was already there. To have a tattoo on your face, in my experience, like piercings, you have to be pretty damn attractive in the first place to carry it off. In the absence of (certainly, children as) a solution and in her desperation to know what this unknown thing is,<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Liz - not unlike Theresa and, no doubt, the many other Theresas that have come after her - turns, to God and prayer. </span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But, if it is not babies that women are all secretly yearning for, is the St. Theresa phenomenon - what Eliot describes as a passion alternating between "a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood" -<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> truly an issue of gender? I know there are men have felt lost or at some point or another have reached a point of crisis. Eliot's portrayal of the poor plight of <i>women</i> can after all be reasonably explained by the pre-emancipation society in which she was writing. Women, such as herself, might aspire to do good work but were circumscribed by their status as dependant daughters and wives, intellectually and morally inferior, to be only helps (or hinderances) to their men or by channelling their creativity through motherhood.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> In Gilbert's modern tale, meanwhile, the women are stronger, more independent; it is Liz's ex-husband who is emotionally dependent on her, and the men who are at a loss for the lack of their children. Yet, I cannot help see the single-mindedness with which the men in <i>my</i> life pursue their work: the cliche that men can only think of one thing at a time sometimes appears, sadly, to be only too true. And is what those men who <i>do</i> drift through life experience what Eliot is speaking of here: the vague yet common yearning for something cannot be attained? Is there such a thing a modern male</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Saint Theresa, "foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed"? Or does Eliot, and Gilbert's book/film speak of such a subject or, at least, state of experience that is essentially female?</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Well, before I have Margaret Atwood screaming about a generational feminist backlash, let me say that I grew up firmly in doubt that the common yearning of womanhood existed within me, so repelled was I - and still can be - by the fact of small children and babies; and I was rather secretly scornful of those school friends that went from one relationship straight into the next as if their life depended on the daily mouth to mouth resuscitation of their boyfriends. On the contrary, I grew up on <i>Little Women</i>, with many quite clear and strong ideas about the rights and roles of women: that they should not be reduced to merely sexual or biological objects, but seen as the intellectual and social equals of men. Along with Eliot I would have taken exception to the suggestion that "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;">the blundering lives," of women so described "are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women," that we are too frail-minded to know our wants and work methodically and systematically to achieve them. That we cannot even decide on what to wear, or to know without asking whether our bums look big in this! I would still argue vehemently, along with Mary Ann Evans (aka George Eliot), that (with the exception of myself, who is far and away the most indecisive specimen ever to have stood in the cereal aisle trying to decide between Fruit and Fibre and Weetabix) this is not so. We may appear by the "sameness" of our clothes and coiffure (a word not used nearly enough in modern English speech in my opinion), over which we are constantly lingering and changing our minds, to be generally silly and trifling, but (as the chivalrous Eliot leaps to our defence) women are chock full of more infinite variety than they would outwardly appear. "Feminine incompetence" cannot be gauged by testing whether or not we can count to three, damn it! But, despite our limitless variation, the indefiniteness remains: unseen - within. It is not something that can be measured - perhaps not anything rational (heaven forbid it might be!) - but, rather, it is something felt.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;">I myself felt - no, in feeling <i>knew</i> - at the tender age of 17, that far from wishing to settle down to life in a small town, I wanted out. However, here already, I can feel my adolescent militant feminism (again) coming unstuck: I wanted 'out' but what did I think I was opting 'in' to? I wanted more, I told myself, but more of what? I would have replied in frustration, <i>something different </i>still without precisely knowing what that meant. And so, I studied and went to university and there acquired a lot more vague ideals and a few concrete ones about what life could - and therefore necessarily would - be. However, in the years since, I admit to having Dorotheaed: to having suffered the same intensity of an abstract desire that Eliot's (and Gilbert's) protagonist does to do or make something of this Life, to participate and almost be absorbed into it, and the attendant frustrations and bitternesses of feeling that I have failed, that it is, perhaps, a task that is doomed to fail because it comes not from a place of reason but emotion. That it is something visceral, something felt, and barely expressible. And it is this fact that has led me, much against feminist ideals and popular thinking, to surmise whether this is not then the experience of the "common yearning of womanhood" - not for babies, but for something that also cries out from the centre of oneself; a place of viscera, the emotions and spirit: a whole world inside of ourselves. And whether therefore Eliot is not, despite writing 150 years ago, entirely right. Is the modern woman search to have it all failing because it is not even about jobs and children, handbags and husbands? Is it not something else entirely that we are reaching for, and in that case what is that? Can it even be found or it is a search without end: unattainable?</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Elizabeth Gilbert's message may at first sight seem more optimistic than George Eliot's. However, both heroines, after a first failed marriage into which they poured all their resources of love, hope, kindness, patience, generosity..., find fulfilment first in and through themselves and then with another. Perhaps this is what that yearning desire is for: union - a sense of oneness or completion. Maybe we go wrong by thinking the answer is to love others first, something we in the West are taught is generous and selfless: to give of ourselves to others, like the sacrifice of Christ or the young Theresa of Avila setting out for martyrdom. But, <i>martyrdom</i>. Perhaps it is as a Chinese husband and father told me lately of his most earnest wish for his daughter, that the most important thing is not to seek to love others but to hope to be loved <i>by</i> them, to work to be the kind of person people love. If the lack of agency seems selfish, indulgent, arrogant, (and I confess it did to me at first) let me suggest that loving others can be a selfish act: we love them that they might love us; we say it that they will say it back. But the quest to be loved must surely start with ourselves, not in a calculated or manipulative way, but in the earnest desire to be the person you would love to be and love to love. That you <i>do</i> love. Perhaps it is in the self that we find the everything else that we were searching for, when we realise that we had it - it was right here - all along. It was us.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Well, that is just a little something I'm working on anyway.</span>English Girlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04687002073498227820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1825598644752262338.post-27647226463529061502010-10-15T23:53:00.002+08:002011-04-05T11:06:37.802+08:00Books you may or may not have read by the time you are 21<i>The Times</i>' list of 'The Books You Must Read Before You're 21' arrived in the post today and as expected it was most disappointing. I mean, <i>The Tale of Tom Kitten</i>? Well, sure, I think most of us can hold our hands up and admit that we have (probably) read or been read this delightful story, but as a 'must read before you're <i>21</i>'?!! More like, before you are old enough to be beaten up at school for reading stories of animals dressed in jerkins and petticoats and mop-caps, surely?! On the other end of the scale, of course, were great novels such as <i>Catch 22.</i> But while I would definitely recommend this to anyone, and currently have one of my caustic teenagers delighting in it, I would not assume to debar those of age from a thorough enjoyment of it. So why, dear <i>The </i><i>Times</i>, the tender age of 21? Is is just to make your readers feel old and past it before their time? Well, Sebastian Faulks, that literary object of idolatry to my former adolescent self - I mean, who has read <i>Birdsong</i> and not wanted to go to bed with the author? (though, of course, I did not say that to my own English teacher at the time who'd recommended it to our class. No, I was still far too deeply blushed by its awakening to countenance admitting to that!) - answered for the choice when he said his entry, Orwell's essays I believe, marked an important step in his coming of to maturity. And yes, I am sure we all have books that we read at one time or another and which seemed to speak just to us, or through which we fell from innocence and grew into the wise and wonderful (bitter and bitten) beings we are today, so that we cannot but look back on those books with the fondness and gratitude of nostalgia. But why, oh why, does<i> The Times</i> imagine that our beloved authors' choices are going to fit with our own or should be laid down for the edification of a young Great Britain? Surely, if anything such a list shows it is the subjectivity with which we - particularly as adolescents - enter the covers of a book, as between the sheets of a some-time lover. So, while I rather hate to have to admit it, I think that Nigella Lawson (that genius of, not so much the art of cooking as of eating - or, as in her last show, of opening jars from Waitrose ...and eating) was right: the books we read before we are 21 are not books that cannot be read at any time thereafter by the common reader, but books which cannot be read again by ourselves. For then those first blushes have already faded and died - that first awakening to a new knowledge or vision of ourselves and the world already dozed off into a middle age ennui - and to go back and read it again would be, to paraphrase Larkin, to cry, lamely admitting how they had touched you then but could not now.<br />
<br />
So, in short: no, there was no <i>Catcher in the Rye </i>on this list, no <i>Little Women, Jane Eyre... </i>I am being slightly ironic (in case it wasn't apparent), mainly at myself for these are, as far as I can remember, about all I was reading around the age of 16 - apart of course from all of Sebastian Faulks (until I saw this photograph and learnt that he had a wife and kids, which spoilt the fantasy somewhat). So, what are the stereotypical bildungsroman of Western Literature? The great formation novels in which the character moves from childhood through adversity to adulthood? <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">David Co<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i>pperfield</i>, Wikipedia suggests. Sure. <i>Great Expectations. </i>Yes. Dickens would feature a lot, wouldn't he? But then there's <i>Anne of Green Gables</i> and <i>Lord of the Rings</i>? Even hobbitsies go through adversity, so Tolkein tells us; and terribly annoying little Polly Annas, though their suffering is less our own than Frodo's and Sam's as it turns out. (I tried to read Anne again recently, for a student you understand, and it managed to quite crush my nostalgic attachment to it, thus proving Nigella right.) And there are the books that in all likelihood we all made to grow up with at school, such as <i>To Kill a Mockingbird </i>- possibly killed by a former pupil's inane annotations or another's rebellious graffiti. But then there are truly great coming of age novels we discover some time later or by ourselves, such as - for me - <i>Sons and Lovers,</i> and even I would hazard to say <i>Jacob's Room </i>(though its less coming of age than a coming to death, without meaning to spoil it for the as yet unacquainted reader)<i>.</i> You may, however, beg to differ, or decide that I cannot nearly have grown up enough yet with such a dearth of reading material. In which case I make a plea for you to add your own choices to the list that we may grow wonderful and wise and short-sighted through too much night-reading together.</span></span><br />
<br />
However, when all is said and done, it must be admitted that lists - and particularly book lists, as Austen's Emma knows only too well - may be rather exciting in theory but can be pretty hopeless in practise. I am a great list maker myself: shopping lists, to do lists (I have one hideous one at the moment telling me the names of all 40 students I must write reports for and, which having diligently compiled and thoroughly depressed myself with the inauguration of the existence of The List, remains very much in the imperative), bills-to-pay lists.... and most recently pros-and-cons-in-my-continued-search-for-a-new-job-list. Pro: more money. Con: longer hours. Pro: more responsibility. Con: less freedom. Pro: swanky office. Con: commercial sell-out. Pro: nice people. Con: Americans. And so it goes on. Utterly hopeless. Or at, least, my lists are. Other people's lists, on the other hand, however objectionable at least force your opinionated (and, yes, my literarily snobbish) hand (but..): The Tale of Tom Kitten?! Why not go all out and plumb for <i>Where's Wally</i>?!!!<br />
<br />
I am, though, at least grateful to my friend for sending the Saturday Review pages of <i>The Times </i>all the way out to Hong Kong, which is something of a critical literary, and literary critical, desert where the<i> South China Morning Post </i>top ten bestsellers list (comprising mainly books-to-screen) compares shamefully with the <i>New York Times',</i><i> </i>making one wonder how they can even face to draw the comparison. Ah, sigh. No, it's no good: Sunday Review newspapers are a thing of my English past when the morning unfolded into the afternoon broadsheet and glossy supplement at a time. But in the absence of a healthy supply of reading fodder - for it is not just the Review sections that seem a distant memory but also bookshops and libraries in which people are not slumped asleep or merely picking up management self-help books between meetings - in the absence of these, the list of books to read gets happily longer and longer. And long may it do so.English Girlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04687002073498227820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1825598644752262338.post-26421292084798335102010-10-13T00:37:00.000+08:002010-10-15T08:35:10.209+08:00How (probably not) to become an English teacherI first came to Hong Kong four years ago, straight after finishing my undergraduate degree, and for the same reason, I suppose, that most 18-21 year olds find themselves doing so: I had no idea what else to do, and desperately wanted a break and an adventure after being cooped up in education for so long. So I signed up to teach English to kindergarten children in the New Territories. And consequently hated it.<br />
<br />
Well, no, that is not entirely true. From this vantage I can look back with some fondness and a degree of partiality at the times spent singing, clapping and playing games with two-year olds; at living on the 27th floor of a 40 story building in a shoe box with barred windows, overlooking a fishing village turned concrete jungle; and the live frogs, fowl and seafood in the wet market below, the nonchalant butcher taking his cleaver to them with one hand while drawing on his cigarette with another. I can recall calmly the complete sense of conspicuousness and alienation at being the only gweilos (literally translated as 'white ghosts' ) in that sprawling mass of tower blocks; the first week in the kindergarten, making the children cry and being touched and stroked as if to make sure I was real, and ever after being stared at on buses and trains and misunderstood in the supermarket, or just ignored in the 7/11, while in McDonalds always being given Chicken Nuggets when asking, in your best Cantonese, for Iced Lemon Tea; and never being able to find your way back out of the shopping plaza as the increasing sense of panic sets in that, like Hansel and Gretel, you'll never find your way home out of the forest alive.<br />
<br />
So, now when I hear people blithely speak of 'culture shock' I nod and smile and think 'you have no idea.' <br />
<br />
Truly having had enough, I left after four months, went home, got several, various jobs and was about to embark on postgraduate studies when I realised, as so often happens, that I didn't have a penny to pay for it; and so, ironically (I guess), found myself coming all he way back to take up a job in Central, Hong Kong, teaching English Literature and Language to international school students. A far cry from my previous teaching experience, but (strangely) the same problem remained of trying to order cold lemony beverages in MacDonalds and always being given something else. Something about that drink they just don't want - or expect you to want - to have.<br />
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Now, I remember the day that I arrived in HK (again) vividly. It happened shortly after BA tried to poison me with one of their revolting breakfast omelettes, dripping with condensation and which, at 4pm local time, was never going to sit right, that I stepped off the plane and straight into a wall of August heat. But if that made it difficult to breathe, like wading through a warm bath, it was nothing compared to the slow-burning furnace of latent hostility that was awaiting me. For, apparently moments prior to my arrival, my new employers had just broken up, thus ending a four year romance and putting their business relationship too firmly on the rocks. And, as if this - obviously not quite spelled out to me by either of them until some days, or possibly weeks (I forget quite), in - as if <i>this</i> wasn't bad enough, I was staying with the male half of that once-upon-a-time partnership and could not for the life of me understand why I seemed to be the object of the female's jealousy and rage. Was it just me? Was I making it up? But she seems so nice and they keep saying - over the many dinners we endured together during those first few weeks as I flat hunted and settled into new life, new job - how pleased they are to have me there.<br />
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Well, looking back it can't have been a bundle of laughs for them; but if she had her reasons to resent me sleeping every night on the sofa of her only-just ex-boyfriend, then I can't say I was too pleased about it either. Sharing a sofa with two pug dogs in hot and humid weather in a room in which the A/C is timed to go off just as jet-lag is kicking in, and waking up sweaty and covered in hair not your own is, needless to say, not much fun. But one person, I know, had real reason to be grateful for my arrival and that was my male boss, host and owner of pugs: Don Quixote, who had, up until I was drafted in, been English teacher to the poor unfortunate students in his care. And I say poor unfortunates, for The Don, you see, did - or I should say, <i>does, </i>for it is not a fact that has undergone much change over the years - not read. I do not doubt that he <i>can </i>read, though there is no actual evidence to prove this conclusively, but just that.... as he says, when there has been a film made of it, and someone's kindly Sparknoted it, why would you want to waste your time on the book? Well, as an English student who was made to read Spenser's <i>The Faerie Queene</i> one summer and all of Shakespeare the next, I can quite sympathise that reading takes time. Unless you're Stephen Fry, it does not happen by osmosis and usually requires slightly more than 90 minutes concentration over popcorn and diet coke. For example, if one Shakespeare play takes a company of actors three hours to enact, how long would 37 plays take one person to read? But I leave the maths to you. As to the rest...Never to have read <i>Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House ... </i>Not even to have heard of Marlowe? It is best not to go there. Anger boils, rage seethes....The thought of teaching a book you've never read....! Deep breaths. Well, it'll be okay. You're here now.<br />
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So I came on board, moved out of Quixote's as quickly as I could into my own apartment over-looking the sea, joined the gym and became heavily invested in all forms of yogic breathing to counter-act the daily doses of attention deficient and hyper activity to be found in our office, not to mention inanity - and that was just my boss. Favourite Donnisms, of just those first few weeks, include the day he introduced me to his gym, Fitness First, gave me a guided tour and was just about to leave me to relax over my first workout when I felt him lingering outside the female changing room doors, not quite wanting, it seemed, to move off. So I lingered too for those awkward few seconds until he must have finally summoned up the courage or found the right words to say in a leaned in whisper: "Just to warn you: There might be naked ladies in there." And with that, left me standing there speechless, hardly daring to laugh. Was he being serious? Was he joking? Was he getting off on the idea or showing real concern about an English girl's modesty? Well, I guess I will never know for sure, but evidence collated in the months and years since point to the former. But, if that was funny, it was nothing compared to the time he offered to bring into work an old pair of swimming goggles for me to use at the plush rooftop pool of the Sheraton Hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui. I thought it was very kind and generous of him and was looking forward greatly to getting my stroke back up to speed under the water, when I came into work to find an enormous snorkelling mask on my desk. Bright florescent green rubber and thick, barely see-through lens. I held them aloft with a loud laugh, exclaiming something along the lines of 'what the f*ck are these?' To which my female boss turned round and replied in dead-pan, matter of fact earnestness, 'Don said you wanted goggles for swimming.' Err, well, yes, but.... did he really think they were what I'd had in mind? and was I really going to offend him by giving them back? Well, give them back I certainly did. I could not with a straight face even pretend that they were anything but ridiculous, even though I appeared to be the only one to think so. After that curious incident, I never did get around to buying proper goggles - nor have I to this date - but I do occasionally look with interest at the eyewear of those other bathers in The Sheraton pool and I can assure you I have seen some strange sights, including most recently a man in wetsuit and rubber gloves resembling Toad of Toad Hall doing aquatic exercises while perving on my sister; but never have I seen any of those fit, burnished, athletic Hong Kong species swimming breast stroke while wearing snorkelling gear. I just don't think, even amongst the most earnest of swimmers, it would be done. Enormous frog-type gloves, perhaps. Snorkelling masks, no.<br />
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But despite this, and a host of ever-increasingly bizarre and inane encounters, I found myself arriving back in Hong Kong for the third time earlier this year to, once again, take up residence at their school, but this time as English Teacher Number Two. I must say the presence of just one other quiet, book-reading, ever so slightly eye-brow raising English accomplice - a fellow conspirator, not least in detecting and drawing out irony wherever it lurks - makes life a little more bearable. But not so much so that I have not been casting about for other jobs. I tell this to you now, of course, in the strictest of secrecy: I am an English teacher on a great escape, planning a jail-break. My success or failure, however, is yet to be seen... but herein lies, in my experience, how best to be an English teacher: harbour rebellion in the bosom of your soul and nurture it in others - wherever you may find it.English Girlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04687002073498227820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1825598644752262338.post-63181690372233168002010-10-12T00:26:00.000+08:002010-10-15T08:40:09.200+08:00An English Girl in a Chinese World??Two objections could be made to the title of this blog. As with most titles, it is only a working title. A working title for a work in progress. But lest I be accused of being deceitful or delusion, let me be the first to raise and, I hope, answer them now.<br />
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Firstly, let me introduce where I live. I live in Discovery Bay, an expat enclave on the outlaying island of Lantau - one of the largest islands and where, as anyone who's landed here recently will know, the new airport was built to the north, directly in the sea. Well, Discovery Bay is to be found on the south east of Lantau, a mere 20-30 minute ferry ride from Central but - in all other senses - about as far away from China as you can get. Yes, I may work in, as I have heard it disparagingly referred to as, the 'ghetto' of Hong Kong (though I hardly think it qualifies as that!), but I live in its strict antithesis. Not a birdcage or temple in sight, barely even a cockroach (though when they do appear they seem all the more threatening and alien for that). No. Instead, we have electric powered golf buggies on the traffic-free roads, a beach whose sand was imported some time back in the 70s and which has since been mostly washed back to wherever it started, and Western coffee shops, bars and restaurants serving pizza, beer and frozen yoghurt. Palm trees line our streets, ghekos remain largely (though not entirely) outside, and children and very tiny dogs the size of rats (but generally as well-dressed as the children) roam free. In fact, our expat commune - a veritable Babel, it's host to so many languages! - is so child-friendly it is often referred to as Delivery Bay, the idea being that people come here to spawn and rear their darling delinquents.<br />
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Now, don't get me wrong, I like it just fine. When people ask why on earth a single young female as myself lives here I can honestly reply that the air is within World Health Organisation accepted levels; that I can see sea and mountains and sky out of my windows (and yes, I reply, as they coo in wonder, I actually <i>have</i> windows - floor to ceiling no less!); that I am blessed with a bath I can lie down in (rather than merely a shower over my lavatory); <i>and</i> what is for the impecunious teacher very important, the rent is really quite low. So I have a number of reasons to be grateful for not living totally in a Chinese world, for being allowed to come home at night to walk under the Narnia-esque street lamps lining pedestrian pavements under the (rarely in Hong Kong glimpsed) stars and watch the airplanes take off from behind the mountains as I fall asleep in bed. However, that is not to say that I have not encountered the occasional twinge of unreality that attends such a place: the Wisteria Lane-Stepford Wives-Twilight Zone effect. But, once I realised what DB (to give it its term of endearment) reminded me of, this feeling of latent anxiety magically subsided. It was that it took me back to my days as a college student working in a theme park in my home county of Staffordshire; of the long hot summer as a 17 year old when I spent day after day there without a care in the world, hanging out with friends and boyfriend, earning more money than I had time or inclination to spend, and never thinking life would ever get any more complicated than that. Well, clearly I was wrong (as just returning to A-Levels that September revealed!), but that sense of theme park wonderland is what Discovery Bay exudes: all the fun and fantasy of the fair without any of the substance. More or less.<br />
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So that, I hope, is the first disclaimer explained. The second refers not to me being English for, while my accent and intonation changes with the proverbial wind - whether I am talking to my Aussie neighbours, or HK students, or Oxford-English friends - I can assure you I am White British and have the passport to prove it. No, it refers more to that quaint use of 'girl.' For while it is most uncouth to ask a woman's age and most undignified ever to answer, I do confess that when a friend recently told me about <i>The Times' </i>list of 'Books you should have read before you're 21' he was quite right to point out that it is 'a bit late for you,' but rather obliging in offering to send it anyway. (Tact isn't his strongest point, but generosity I suppose is.) So, we shall see when it finally gets here just how behind in my age I really am. But, guessing from the number of times, while on holiday in the UK last year with my mother, I kept getting taken for a child and charged entrance fees accordingly (if only my mother had gone along with it quietly we could've saved a fortune!) and the fact that I still now (left to my own more dishonest devices) manage to get away with a child's ticket to work every day on the ferry (thus leaving me with some money for alcohol each month out of my measly wages), I am guessing about ten years. I mean, sure it could be to do with the fact that I am usually to be seen with GCSE textbooks or children's books tucked under my arm, or the fact that the hemline of my skirts has sufficiently shortened since moving to a warmer climate; or it could be to do with the amount of time I spend with my head somewhere between my legs - backward bends, according to my yoga teacher, being particularly good for extending one's life expectancy and youthful good looks - I don't know. But when they say that you are as old as you feel, I often think that it must be this because for better or worse, I cannot feel how old I really am, by which I mean I cannot actually believe it when I tell others. As when I first went for coffee with my new neighbour and she, clearly uncertain, asked. The silence that followed could've added a few years to both our lives before I would've been able to tell her the answer. I simply did not know off the top of my head and had to revert to calculating it. And now you will think that I am ancient - such an age as cannot be arrived at but by the most complex mathematical workings. So I shall tell you I am 25: old enough to know my age, but not quite old enough to feel it.<br />
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So maybe not exactly an English girl in a totally Chinese world, but not too far from the truth either, as I shall uncover.English Girlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04687002073498227820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1825598644752262338.post-80677077780236193832010-10-11T11:25:00.000+08:002010-10-15T08:46:18.232+08:00Hello Missie-ah"Hello Missie-ah," comes the welcome call from the Saint Honore bakery as I stop off on my way to, from or in between work. Since I left and, then, returned they've moved shops, from near our old office to now near to our new one. Were they following us? Perhaps. Well, lucky for me, as their raisin buns are about the only food to be had in the vacinity that an English speaking vegetarian can trust. Otherwise its a plate of green vegetables (big enough for a whole family to share), and that is rather hard to eat on the run.<br />
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I am an English teacher, or rather, tutor. And our office is a small school in a tall thin office building in, what is just about, Sheung Wan. Hong Kong. You could pretend that we were in Central, as the street name suggests, but really - by proximity to the MTR station and the presence of street hawkers, infrequency of coffee shops and number of minibus stops (whose destinations are only fathomable to those patrons of the city) - we are Sheung Wan. For that, however, I am glad. No longer are we located above McDonalds under the shadow of IFC; no longer do I have to bear with my students bringing burgers, fries and milkshakes to their lessons - or rather, having them brought up to them by their helpers. No. The only food consumed in lessons these days is the occasional piece of seaweed obligingly handed out by my sycophantic boss, Sir Don. Or Don Quixote, as I like to think of him.<br />
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So, I frequent these streets regularly, passing by the alleyways that harbour food, clothes and antique market vendors; I buy freshly squeezed juice on the street for $10, and pay $50 to get my heels fixed from frequently getting caught in the cracks in the paving. Yet I get approached by the same guys trying to sell women's tailoring, copy handbags and fake watches, and (as the other day) I get bumped by surprising hard shouldered, aged Chinese men starring accusingly at you for being in their way. Their street. Their city. And of course, they are right, so I apologise - in English, and thus do nothing to lessen their disdain.<br />
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But up in my hallogenous booth - a tiny desk in an open-sided white cube - I discourse (on a good day) on Montaigne, Orwell, Atwood and Heaney with fresh faced, open-eyed youngsters who seem more Western than I am (their accents being somewhat geographically left of UK, but where in the US it would be hard to pin down: somewhere between CSI and Hannah Montana one supposes) - and, for a short while at least, I am at home.English Girlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04687002073498227820noreply@blogger.com