SIR PERCY IS ALSO A BOWL OF NOODLES
In Cantonese, that is.
Michael Sheridan is learning
the language of the future
Hong Kong THERE ARE many fashionable things to do in Hong Kong, from consuming Can- tonese food in the exotic surroundings of David Tang's China Club to buying Italian fashions from hard-faced Cantonese sales- girls. Learning the Cantonese language, however, is not one of them.
It is, therefore, a small group that assembles each week in a classroom high up on the slopes of Hong Kong island. By this time of the evening the diligent schoolchildren have long gone, no doubt to those fearsome hours of homework that will enable them to outsmart their dullard European rivals. A steady stream of taxis groans up the hillside to decant people coming to agreeable evening classes in Chinese calligraphy or floral arrange- ments.
Not many of them climb all the way to the third floor, where the mysteries of Cantonese are unfolded. Frankly, one can understand why. The people of Hong Kong, in their tens of thousands, flock earnestly to tuition in Mandarin, the mainstream tongue of mainland China spoken by the best part of one billion human beings. They presume, with good reason, that proficiency in Putonghua, or 'common language', will stand them in patriotic good stead after the British leave next July. That leaves only a few mainlanders and a number of undaunted foreigners who have any interest in acquiring a working knowledge of a language spoken by most of the six million inhabitants of Hong Kong and at least 60 million more in the neighbouring province of Guangdong. Undaunted you have to be. For a start, there is the fact that reasonable mastery of Cantonese is unlikely to enable even the most fleeting conversation with a Peking taxi-driver. Then there is the exceedingly daunting information that although both Mandarin and Cantonese are tonal lan- guages, there are more tones to master in Cantonese. The ramifications are terrify- ing. It is quite literally the case that with- out correct command of the six main tones, it is possible to insult the dignity of your local tailor's grandmother while ask- ing for the measurements of a pair of trousers. Well, one thinks at this point, basic Arabic turned out to be not so bad, maybe this will be the same. Ha! There are deceptive moments of reassurance. No past tense? Phew. No Romance language gender-traps? Fine . . . up to a point. No Teutonic diktats about word order in the sentence? How beguilingly Oriental. How does one say yes or no? Well . . . one doesn't, exactly. Gosh, the student thinks, it's all so vague! Just how did Sir Percy Cradock and all those frightfully clever Foreign Office types pin down the Chinese when they were negotiating over the future of this place?
Lesson by lesson, the artful uses of the Chinese language sink in. Take, for exam- ple, the classifiers. Never heard of a classi- fier? Well, it is a useful word that groups the nouns after it. So you can't simply demand, let us say, a bowl of fried rice. The dutiful student learns that the bowl being a round object like a coin — adopts a classifying prefix without which its sylla- bles may mean nothing. For good mea- sure, the classifier for round objects also includes people and nations. So Sir Percy Cradock of Great Britain takes the same classifier as a bowl of noodles. There must be something instructive in that. Could it be that our chaps were not quite as bril- liant as we thought?
But these are unworthy thoughts for us classroom pupils plodding through our verbs and numbers in the humid Hong Kong night through our verbs and num- bers. So far we have not even contem- plated the task of learning Chinese characters — there are, it will be remem- bered, some 70,000 possible variations but even so, a dim perception of Chinese life and mentality begins to glimmer through the mental morass. It reminds me of a marvellous moment described in Jonathan Raban's 1970s book about trav- elling in Arabia, when the author emerges onto the Edgware Road after a language lesson and suddenly all the squiggles and squirls on the awnings of kebab houses and video emporia resolve themselves into graceful curling conso- nants and vowels. Chinese will never be as yielding as Ara- bic in that sense. But there are still some fundamental things you can divine. The word for China itself simply means 'middle country' as befits a land whose people for centuries thought it to be the centre of earthly power. The letter character for China shows a circle (or oval, or rectangle) bisected by a vertical slashing line, quite a corporate logo if you think bout it. A West- ern-style jacket is described as just that: `Western clothes'.
Most of this is common to both Man- darin and to Cantonese. In written script they can hardly be told apart. Anyone in Hong Kong who wants to can read the Peo- ple's Daily, although for some reason you never see the yuppies here reading it over their cappuccinos. The problems arise in verbal communication. Almost none of the oral language sounds the same. Mandarin growls and slurs its way through sentences, Cantonese twitters and chimes. It is the echo of the emperor versus the music of the courtesan.
So the Cantonese are getting ready to welcome their compatriots in 1997 by def- erentially preparing themselves to socialise with cadres and entrepreneurs descending from Peking. This marks something of a cultural revolution for Hong Kong, whose people in recent decades were wont to mock the peasant oafishness associated with Maoist Putonghua. The advance guard of mainlanders already in Hong Kong will welcome the change in tone: plaintive newspaper articles have appeared in which promising young bankers from Chinese enterprises lament their social isolation in Hong Kong, where the girls ignore them and their evenings consist of a takeaway in front of the video. So far as I am aware, nobody has sold a Cantonese version of Men Behaving Badly to the third-rate local television channels, but perhaps the pro- ducers should test the market.
The result of all this cultural confusion is to leave many temporary residents won- dering if it is worth bothering with Can- tonese at all. Hong Kong likes to portray itself as a thriving cosmopolitan place, and after all these years of enlightened British administration surely everybody speaks English? The fact is that they don't. Colonial rule, if anything, has prej- udiced the young against it. Far greater common fluency in English is to be found in Singapore, while some employers in Hong Kong are eagerly awaiting recruits from Shanghai, where bright young peo- ple are learning the new global language at a phenomenal rate. Perhaps we are all wasting our time, for it is said that even the verbally challenged Hong Kong taxi- drivers are mastering the basics of Man- darin. I wonder what 'sorry, mate, I'm on me way home to Kowloon' sounds like in the noble tongue of Confucius?
Michael Sheridan is Far East correspondent of the Sunday Times.
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