Free The Family Law by Benjamin Law Page B

‘tail.’
    Because of its tonal quality, linguists describe Cantonese as a language that’s sung, which might suggest the language is pretty or melodious. But songs can also be terrible and cruel. Think of the late-night sexual moans of the feral cat, the broken wail of the American coyote, or the screeching of the rabies-infested bat. To my ears, Cantonese is not a sung language at all, but a screamed one, a dialect for bickering, exclaiming over scandals and haggling over meat prices.
    But hey: who am I to say? My parents speak Cantonese to me, and while I understand most of what they’re saying, I’m basically mute when it comes to speaking the language myself. To outsiders, that seems like an odd arrangement, but the analogy I use is music. Everyone understands the language of music, has an innate comprehension of how it works, but not everyone can play it. When it comes to Cantonese, I can understand the music, but I can’t replicate it. Cantonese might be a tonal language, but over the years I’ve become tone deaf.
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    Of the five siblings, Michelle and I are the worst. When friends see our mother talking to Michelle and me in Cantonese, they say how lucky we are to have a secret language, to be able to talk about people right in front of them without their knowing. When Candy, Andrew or Tammy speak in Cantonese, pointing out the girth of someone’s arse or the fact that they’ve tucked their dress into their underwear, Michelle and I will understand and laugh with them. But when we try to speak, we lose words and grimace into space, silently moving our lips as if we’ve suffered a terrible stroke. ‘Goh-goh … man,’ we’ll say, pointing to someone behind his back, ‘hae-hoe … obese.’
    For my twenty-first birthday, my boyfriend, Scott, enrolled me in a short course in Cantonese. It would have been difficult to find. While Mandarin is the language of mainland China – the future gatekeeper of 21 st-century economics, the Sleeping Giant, the Slumbering Dragon, the Sneaky Chinaman – Cantonese is considered the obscure and irrelevant poor cousin. The only people this Cantonese language course catered for were the children of Hong Kong migrants whose guilt was starting to play heavily on them, or whose grandparents were dying.
    The lessons took place every week at 8 . 30 a.m. on the top level of an ugly, brown-brick, labyrinthine building that smelled as musty as a disused cellar. It was situated on the periphery of a university campus, in a spot that seemed to be bathed in perpetual shadow. On the first morning, I arrived to meet a small group of seven, all of us smiling nervously at one another as we waited for the teacher to arrive. Nearly everyone there was like me: Chinese kids raised in Australia, trying to regain the language they’d lost. You are my people , I thought to myself, privately exhilarated that there were others in the world who shared my inadequacies. I could bond with them.
    There were exceptions, though. Peter was the lone white person, an older gentleman who’d recently begun a romantic relationship with a woman from Macau.
    â€˜Right now,’ Peter told me, ‘she speaks no English besides “yes” or “no.” And I don’t speak any Cantonese at all, so that’s why I’m here: trying to reach some middle ground, so we’ve at least got some basic communication going on.’
    Their situation baffled me.
    â€˜So how have the two of you communicated up until this point?’ I asked.
    â€˜Well,’ he said, ‘I guess you could say we communicate with our bodies.’
    I avoided Peter after that.
    Two other students also stood apart: a young Eurasian brother-and-sister duo. Between them, they’d inherited the high Oriental cheekbones of their Chinese mother and the regal Norse forehead and nose of their Scandinavian father. The combination made them