在咬文嚼字的过程当中
粤语零基础网课：WEEK 1 OF 10
The discussion questions below were prompted by our class seminar lead. This week's topic: "Dialect and Nationalism: Situating the Cantonese Language between Mandarin and English".
What is your story with language?
I didn't know Cantonese existed (the language or any of the associated culture) until I was maybe 17 or 18 yrs old. When I said this fact to a friend once removed, an ABC who had grown up in a household speaking the language, she laughed and said "me neither." Unfortunately, I didn't and couldn't mean that as a joke. As a child, my origins in Cantoland were scrapbooked in a chunky leather 3ring binder and recited out loud to me by a very doting and unreliable narrator, my adoptive mother. This artifact was lined w hole-punched pages that my mom had typed entirely in Word 2007 Arial Bold and then slid into laminated pouches. It consisted of a few crucial but incomplete and/or inaccurate details, peppered with all the usual well-meaning liberal white adoptive parent rhetoric. See my faithful reconstruction below:
You were born in San Shui, China, in the year 2000. Your Chinese birth mother gave you your brown skin and almond shaped eyes. She loved you very much, but she couldn't keep you. She brought you to the San Shui Social Welfare Orphanage, where Uncle Derr and the nannies took care of you until your American parents were ready for you. We traveled together through Hong Kong, Guang Zhou, and on a long airplane ride, until finally we came back to America as a family. Even though you didn't come out of my tummy and you don't look like Mommy and Daddy, you are still our daughter. You are very lucky and special to have two mommies that love you.
I'm not going to elaborate on this, bc honestly I think the suitcase unpacks itself. The reason I bring it up tho, is because this tertiary source is the only material I had for two decades that even hinted at Cantonese heritage. My parents never said the word Cantonese, but neither did anyone else. The Chinese I grew up hearing, and which informed my own speech patterns as I began to learn the language, was Mandarin as spoken by the local Chinese community that my mom connected me to. As far as I know, the majority was first and second-gen Fujianese, Taiwanese, and Shanghainese immigrants, labels that I also had never heard spoken aloud until later in high school and in college (probs bc identity politics didn't become more of a thing till the mid-late 2010s), and until I was informed by my friends who come from such families. From my perspective, the adults whispered or shooed us kids away when a discussion became this personal, and we usually set our differences aside as we raced to see who could run the fastest from one end of the lion dance studio to the other.
All this to say, I never met someone who identified themselves as Cantonese, and I much less spoke or even heard the language. I had only ever been exposed to Mandarin, and therefore I thought it was the sole Chinese language. Until I went to college I never had a single convo in Mandarin, but I grew up knowing tones, pronunciation, and stroke order thanks to calligraphy classes, the drills in summer camp and Chinese school where I never made it past the intro level, and flashcards with pinyin on one side and English on the other. The specific concept/fact of Cantonese began to crystallize for me maybe my first year of college, thanks to my linguistics major rabbit holes and my Mandarin class that met seven times a week, where I had to explain my background to my classmates and teachers each of those times. The first time I remember hearing the Cantonese language spoken aloud and knowing what it was, was with my first-year roommate, an ABC from the California of the east coast, North Jersey. She was a shy soul who yet always had drama w our floormates, 佢识听唔识讲, and her parents would suddenly switch to Cantonese when talking about me on the phone (I'm pretty sure about this. They would call, she would make eye contact w me across the room, quickly look away, and try to get her parents to change the subject) That experience didn't ignite shame in me, really, just confusion and suspicion.
Whatever it was, I ignored it in pursuit of the attainable goal in front of me, which was being able to actually speak Mandarin. Eight years later, I'm still not as fluent as I'd like. But I did achieve it. I accomplished it thru studying way harder than I did for any other class, embarrassing myself ridiculously often, watching drama episodes and Kuaishou shorts and pausing every five seconds to repeat after what the speakers in the video said, talking on Wechat / over the phone with random language exchange partners and international students at my college during the official COVID lockdowns and the petri-dish conditions that followed, writing transcripts of everything i heard and asking them to explain the grammar or vocab I didn't understand, making flashcards and spreadsheets with a level of detail that only an autist can love, getting dicked down, and getting entangled in the only two situationships that have ever meant anything to me (Yipeng - my starcrossed, although you'd never admit it to yourself, and Chen - I know you'll be text me back in six months and then drop off the radar completely once we reach the topic of your dating life). Somewhere along the way, I began to be able to get haircuts, bargain at stores, gossip with friends' and students' parents, help library patrons, lead storytimes and classes, live in China for a month speaking no English except to my 寻亲代表 and to my ABC friends on the phone, and having more ppl in the diaspora look at me and defaulting to Chinese instead of English.
So I guess I've done ok in these 8 yrs of formally learning. Even tho my speaking ability deteriorates sometimes, with me living/working where I am now (in a community that doesn't rlly speak Mandarin). I've forgotten some things, and some days nothing I say makes sense. Sometimes I can't understand the simplest word if said by a person with an accent I haven't heard before. Despite these roadblocks, I can still communicate almost everything that I want to even if I have a bit of difficulty, and I can self-correct usually, and that's more than my past self would have ever expected of me.
Among all of this, when did I start learning Cantonese? Maybe in the last 3-4 years, once the intensive stage of my Mandarin study settled down. So far, Cantonese has come to me very informally, in bits and pieces of pronunciation, swears, question words, names of food, pronouns, and other tidbits that I've heard in the street / found online. The catalyst for me really wanting to learn was that I really had to confront my inability to speak canto on my trip back home. Yes, literally everyone local spoke it except me. And ppl did question me about it. By people, I mean basically everyone who I had a deeper conversation with, from police officers to friends and their moms and even the caregiver who my parents called Uncle Derr, whose cosmopolitan niece found me on XHS, and who turned out to be the social welfare institute director and actually a woman nicknamed 徳叔, long retired from her job sending children into the WASP's nests and who typed her messages to me in a heavy Canto accent.
In this process, I learned that my growing Mandarin knowledge makes it that much easier and harder to learn Canto. Easier bc so much of the vocab and grammar is similar/basically same. I can follow along and piece together a lot of the language esp with subtitles. I found that I pick up things if I walk around in Chinatown for not even 30 min, and when I was in Foshan, old ladies stopping me at every corner has me knowing at least things like "靓女三水B线车站喺边度啊". On the other hand, harder bc I'm the oldest and therefore least neuroplastic I've ever been, and trying to eke out a sentence in Cantonese reminds me of how I used to live syllable by syllable in Mandarin, and knowing how much work is ahead of me, and how Mandarin is such an easy crutch but knowing that when I speak it, ppl will give me the "why-are-you-still-speaking-poudungwaa-dim-gaai-m-gong-baakwaa" look, and learning resources are inconsistent and not always good quality (except for you, open cantonese dot org), and theyre often HK Canto based and I want to resist sounding that way, and bc I don't have anyone to talk to except ironically my current Mandarin tutor, who happens to be from Qingyuan but sometimes still insists on me erhua-ing the hell out of everything.....I'm just riffing at this point LOL. Which is how I learn. Until I don't!
Anyways TLDR, I finally reached that point where I wanted to study formally. Now I'm here. I finally found a class that caught my eye, the only one I've found so far which teaches from a decolonial worldview that I want to explore and indulge more. I'm not sure how effective a 30 person intro language class over zoom will be (session 1 was wholesome but a bit chaotic), but either way, it's time for me to lock in. It was time long ago. Ignorance and inertia and confusion clouded me and I wish I had cared abt this more earlier, but this isn't about ruminating over my past inactions. However this 10 week class goes, the circumstances are right and I know this is just the beginning. I'd change everything to find my way back to cantoland from turtle island. And did. And am and will.
Do you know what part of Canton you are connected to?
Short answer: Not HK or Macao
Long answer: My family search in China revealed that there's a high chance I was born to "外地打工人", therefore Saamseoi is less of a birthplace than it is a place of abandonment (this part I knew). But it's a connection all the same. Since gathering more historical context and learning abt many other adoptees' backgrounds, I suspect I still have familial ties in Sanshui or Foshan area...but as for what science says....Western DNA sites point to the part of the Pearl River Delta between Jiangmen and Dongguan. Not sure if that's bc of the amount of ppl w Hoisan ancestry in the diaspora who r taking these tests, but still tracks (which could mean nothing). The Chinese DNA site I'm on points overwhelmingly to Zhanjiang which also tracks bc I know that many children were abandoned there, and surprisingly to me, Meizhou and Shantou and a bunch of Hakka and Teochew speaking cities in 粤东. Who knows? This could also mean nothing. But I have the world's most Cantonese face, so I'm probably not from anywhere else. Hope to know the real answer within my lifetime.
What other dialects within the Cantonese language might interest you?
目前算是佛山市五个区的地方话：禅城、南海、三水、高明、顺德、因为几个朋友跟我说了这些地方的方言的声调有时候不一样，然后有一些不同的词汇，然后……在广州和深圳说的地方话…… 湛江话也可以考虑，就是没听到很多，唯一听到的例子应该是小红书上的脱口秀演员跳跳，不知道她是否能代表大多数人的湛江话……反正学到这些知识我都很乐意学习，天天向上吧！
HOMEWORK: 自我介绍 (edited as of June 2026. Excuse any mistakes bc i still know very little.)
大家好，我嘅名係Junni, 我係00年嘅，今年廿六岁。我喺图书馆返工。我係一個美国华裔，我好多朋友都係美国华裔。我识讲英文、普通话、同埋少少该嘅白话。我想学粤语因为我嚟自广东三水。嗰度嘅本地人差唔多都识讲。我最钟意食糯米鸡、虾饺、同肠粉。今日我心情唔好，因为返工好攰，所以我有啲肚疼。如果听日唔上课，我请你哋饮茶！