A ONE PIPE PROBLEM

Many Cantonese have a greatly goofy sense of humour, verging at times on absurdity. A young staff member of a bakery where I stopped off for a cup of naai cha (奶茶 milk tea) and a snack right around four in the afternoon told another customer there sternly that my speech was better (clearer, more intelligible) than his. Which, of course, is impossible. He grew up speaking it, I grew into it. And he's eighty years old. It's still his first language.


Thirty years ago there was a gangster movie in which a white nun testified on behalf of the accused. Her Cantonese sounded very very white. As must, I fear, mine.


Good thing I hardly ever speak Mandarin.
I'd probably sound Mormon.
Horribly so.

As it is, I suspect I sound like some half-breed dockworker most of the time, though I do have a clean and fairly civilized Canto vocabulary. Leastways, most of the right words.

I'd probably look severely askance if my daughter brought someone like me home as boy friend material, if I had a daughter and she was that age. Why don't you just invite in some hairy tattooed hippie and shoot me now, okay? And dammit, why does he smell like that?!?

A faint echo-fragrance of good pipe tobacco is delightfully old-fashioned, quite suitable for gentlepersons of either gender, and preferable to the bold trashy reek of patchouli.
Which, unfortunately, is coming back.

When a young Cantonese miss smells like patchouli, one suspects that she has made some bad decisions in her life. Earlier on Pacific I had noticed that odeur from two passers-by, and had wondered at it. American borns, obviously. Or perhaps wearing it ironically: "hi, look at us, we're 1960's hippies and we smell like it too!"

Maybe taking their halloween ideas out for a test spin.
Or trolling for old fossils.


I did mention the goofy sense of humour, did I not?
Possibly it's just the younger generation.
Fewer moorings, more afloat.


冇厘頭。



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