New Cantonese podcast
Hoi hoi, it's finally happening - I have started a podcast again! Of course it's about Cantonese, but this time from a different position: From exile in Spain.
I have found the perfect partner slash wingman; ah-Hei who used to live in the same Hong Kong village as me back in the 90s or early 2000s. Now she lives in exile in Sheffield.
It is true that Hong Kong always was a transitory place - especially since many were sent there by their company as a "hardship" posting with a company car, live-in servants etc for a limited time - but it seems that most of the people I ever knew there (including many Chinese) have now left. Did all the patriotism get the better of them?
This must suit the communist Chinese government to a tee, for wherever there are irritating locals; Tibet, Inner Mongolia, East Turkestan, they just swamp the place with their own people and voila, it's a Han Chinese place where only Mandarin works. Even when I lived there, they had started with the "patriotic" education in primary schools, strongly suggesting that English won't be a world language for long and that Mandarin is the ticket to the future. Cantonese was only to be scoffed at if it was lucky.
And considering that the Hong Kong government has been importing 150 mainland Chinese PER DAY since 1997, possibly but not necessarily pausing for a few days during Covid, it's no wonder that the unwashed Mandohooligan masses are elbowing out the indigenous people and language. Like the scorpion on the frog's back, they just can't help themselves. It's their nature.
So anyway, like the aforementioned Tibet and Inner Mongolia, Hong Kong will soon be a place where the culture and language are no longer living things, but curiosities to be gawked at by mainland tourists. If that! Because Hong Kong people have never been into handicrafts, funny colourful costumes and dancing.
Ah! I'm getting all maudlin again. As did the podcast before long, because it IS very sad to see a great place like Hong Kong slowly, then faster and faster sink into the morass of corruption, lawlessness and fear that follows that scorpion whenever it catches a ride.
Still, now you can learn Cantonese from ah-Hei and me - free!
Or you can take lessons from me.
Learn Cantonese the natural way - from a Norwegian!