Last night I went to my first Cantonese class, in anticipation of our sojourn to Hong Kong later this year. (Having to pay to learn Cantonese is a cringeworthy matter for me and I guess many other alienated children of migrants who can’t properly speak their parents’ language. This inability makes me scared to go to Chinatown. It lies at the heart of an identity crisis which I’ve not yet been able to productively explore, even though this very local politics of race and “cultural identity” — which I approach by combining a sense of post-assimilation mourning with a refusal to accept a return to authentic wholeness — are what initially led me to my interest in cultural politics in general. The problem is that I’ve used my suspicion of “identity politics” as an alibi for this cringe-factor, which means that my critical work in cultural politics has always been inflected in ways that have completely erased my own experiences — I’ve basically stayed away from “Chineseness” altogether, both “theoretically” and in “everyday life”, if such a distinction is tenable.)
The coolest thing about the class is that our teacher is the most distractible person I’ve ever met. We were learning the Cantonese name for kiwifruit, which is apparently “kèihyigwó” — an obvious transliteration from English. When I asked her for the original name for the fruit (which, of course, comes from China), she told a very long and seemingly disconnnected bunch of stories. Twenty minutes later, after we’d heard about starving Chinese migrants in New Zealand wearing sack-cloth clothes and committing suicide in the cold waters of Dunedin, and an apparent non-sequitur about Bing Lee/John Woo/Nicolas Cage, she finally answered my question with the observation that there are many names for kiwifruit, and that such names are also often completely contingent — Hong Kong market people would simply market them, in impromptu fashion, under “cool” names like “Jade Fruit”. Very cool.
[ tags: aotearoa, cantonese, kiwifruit, migration, naming, new-zealand, suicide ]
The Santa Cruz History of Consciousness diaspora and their work, I think, holds a lot of clues to the conundrum in your first para, one which I find fascinating, from a different subjective angle. Teresia Teaiwa helpfully distinguishes between a static “Pacific identity” and an active “Pacific identification”. So to accept one’s subjective orientation to particular cultural currents (which is I think a pre-req for sustainable collaborative cultural work - this is essentially Spivak’s subultern essay) is not to fix it in one’s “identity” but in an itinerary of experiences that lead to a desire to explore those cultural currents.
While you initially assert pragmatic reasons to learning Cantonese, there is obviously some serious liminality going on in this decision, which to me ultimately sounds like: I’d rather be someone who knows Cantonese than refuses to know it. That is a political, rather than identitarian choice (though it has subjective impacts :7). I’m analogising (perhaps inappropriately) to the NZ experience, where many Maori of 30-60 years old are coping with the experience of their kids coming through speaking te reo and gaining a great deal of cultural power from it, whereas the 30-60 generation might have been beaten for speaking it in school, and generally were subject to assimilative politics. The playwright Hone Kouka is very good on those complex dynamics. I’ve lost my point but it was something like that at the end of the day language is almost all that “culture” can really mean, and I live with an increasing sense of frustration that the social/institutional environment I grew up in left me effectively monolingual, but increasingly determined to learn languages like te reo Maori whose mere existence causes rupture and horror in parts of white settler culture. (I think español works in a related way in the US, and possibly Cantonese would in Aust. - it is a marker of identification with “the other side”)
anyway, the class sounds like fun.
“Itinerary” is interesting. I’d probably use words like “affiliation” and “affinity”, rather than “identification”, though. Although I suspect that neither really gets at the sedimentations of where you come from.
Incidentally, while I HK I’ll be meeting Simon Ng, who apparently went to Cultural Futures.
my stepmum is trying to get my 4 year old half brother into canto class. she’s from HK herself and she wants him to indulge the chinese in his heritage but since my dad speaks very little it’s hard to do at home. her parents (who speak no english) recently stayed and it sparked oskar’s interest in the language so she wants to take advantage of this.
does your school run classes for kids and parents? she’s at a loose end as to wear she can find such a class…
your teacher sounds like a hoot. i’m a sucker for the tangents
I’m afraid the market for learning Cantonese is small at the moment, I guess because Mandarin’s the big thing for “penetrating” those emerging Chinese markets. I remember going to Mandarin classes as a kid (you know, the whole ethnic community languages on a Saturday afternoon thing), but no Cantonese.
Despite mum being a skippy, dad being a typical pig-headed Bosnian Serb insisted that his sons would speak Serbian. So when little bro and me first started to speak if we spoke to dad in English he simply ignored us. It obviously worked cos we still both speak pretty good Serbian. Far better than many Oz-born Yugos with both parents from ex-Yugo. Some of them can barely communicate with their parents cos the parents despite being here for decades haven’t picked up English.
We also had to do the whole boring Serbian school thing on top of normal school for a few years as kids but it was pretty useless.
Anyway, good luck with learning Cantonese Ben.
cheers Pete