DISCUSSIONS OVER CONDIMENTS

Something that often happens when I open my mouth speaking Cantonese to someone who has never encountered me before is that they immediately assume that my wife must be Chinese. Because, and this is not put so bluntly most of the time, we white people are too damned stupid to learn how to speak Cantonese unless some desperate woman who fixated upon us as her most promising meal ticket (maybe whitey has a degree from a prestigious university or lots of money) spent aeons hammering it into our thick smelly skulls.

Or, as my barber a while back jokingly explained to another customer, my being able to speak Cantonese was so I could go to Hong Kong to kau neui (溝女 "pick up chicks").

[Note: homophonously also 勼女 or 沟女 with exactly the same pronunciation ('kau niu') and meaning.]


Cantonese people have a lousy opinion about white men, and their own womenfolk. I mean, why else would a girl date or marry a white dude, unless he has money or prospects?
Possibly she's absolutely desperate, or completely sex-crazed?

And, like all white men, he's probably an absolute wolf, and he smells bad too.
So she ONLY hooked up with him because he was trainable.
And he could be manipulated with food.
Plus culture and wiggles.


No, I never bother mentioning that my ex girlfriend is Cantonese American, or explaining that I already spoke Cantonese before we started seeing each other, and that the only Chinese she knows is an unintelligible version of Toisanese (her parents first language), and that we've always spoken English with each other ...... Because it's her native language.

No need for a Chinese male chauvenist of whichever gender to know that.


我未結婚 ...
['ngo mei git fan']


Five men I know are married to Cantonese women. None of them can speak even half-assed Cantonese. They didn't watch hundreds of Hong Kong movies, and I bet they don't collect dictionaries either. And their knowledge of Brederode and Vondel is probably zilch.
As far as I know their wives didn't run a credit report on them.
Maybe their in-laws did. But I haven't asked.

Succesful relationships take flexibility, tact, and selective deafness.

And ignoring all those neighbors and acquaintances.

With their big honking noses.




The title of this essay? Well, I was browsing the well-stocked condiment wall and reading the labels. We white people normally can't cook worth diddly. Everyone knows that.




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