We’re shaking up our longstanding Pop Cantonese series by inviting author Eva Wong Yi to offer her take on distinctly Cantonese expressions. Wong is known for her Chinese-language short stories, including the collections Ways to Love in a Crowded City (擠迫之城的戀愛方法) and The Four Seasons of Lam Yip (林葉的四季).
Whenever I finished writing a first draft, I’d ask one of my oldest friends Phoebe if she would read it and give me her honest feedback. She always said yes, no matter which timezones we were in and how busy she was in her migrant academic life. After publishing stories in Chinese for 17 years, I started writing regularly in English for Zolima CityMag. When I sent Phoebe a draft of Pop Cantonese, she exclaimed in our online chatbox: “Oh it’s in chicken intestines!”
I’m sure her surprise wasn’t with my ability to write in English, but with my finally feeling confident enough to do so. After all, we’ve been texting each other every day exclusively in English since the beginning of our friendship in secondary school, despite both of us being born and raised in Hong Kong with Cantonese as our mother tongue. She helped me understand citation styles when I was doing my MA in English, and I helped her “human proof” her professional emails when she felt that it needed a marginally more neurotypical touch. My being able to write in “chicken intestine” shouldn’t really come as a surprise to her.
Chicken intestines (雞腸 gai1 coeng4) is a slightly old fashioned yet still funny way to refer to the English language in Hong Kong Cantonese, with the connotation that the speaker doesn’t understand English well. The exact origin of the metaphor is hard to pinpoint, but it is widely accepted that it came from the colonial days, when English proficiency among Hong Kong Chinese people in general wasn’t as high. Compared to the uniform squares that Chinese characters come in, English looks like a series of squiggly connected lines, just like a string of uncut chicken intestines. As someone who often struggles with reading cursive and English handwriting in general, I fully understand the frustration of trying and failing to understand a bunch of squiggly ink lines with important messages hidden in them.
“Chicken intestine” is often used in self-deprecating jokes about one’s own English language abilities, or in a defensive way that puts down the foreign tongue as something frivolous, even barbaric. The classic gangster movie series Young and Dangerous, based on the popular comic book Teddy Boy (古惑仔), detailed the adventures of a group of young triad members in a world of crime and opportunity. The first movie in the series, Young And Dangerous (古惑仔之人在江湖), released in 1996, was set ten years earlier. The post-war baby boom crammed resettlement estates with young people who didn’t fit in with the public education system characterised by rote learning. Instead of more “productive” pursuits, many of them spent all day loitering in public areas of the estates to burn off their youthful energy, thus becoming easy targets for triad recruitment.
The movie opened with a group of male students skipping school to play football in a resettlement estate ball court controlled by gangsters. The leader of the students, Brother Lam, asks one of the school uniform-clad boys: you ran away from school again? The boy replied: “Gam1 jat6 caak1 jing1 man4, di1 gai1 coeng4 sik1 ngo5 ngo5 m4 sik1 keoi5 aa1!” (今日測英文，啲雞腸識我我唔識佢啊!) The official English subtitles were, “We have English test today, but I haven’t any revision!”; a literal translation would be “We have an English test today, the chicken intestines know me but I don’t know them!” with the latter half of the sentence emphasising how foreign and unknown the “chicken intestines” were.
Upon hearing that his friend ran away from school because his English was bad, another young boy started chanting “a man and a pan, a pan and a man” in a sing-song voice to mock him. This is a reference to the first lines in a commonly used Oxford University Press English textbook in the 1980s, and in the context of the film, it was used to highlight how rudimentary these boys’ English proficiencies were that the only English they can speak are the very first lines from the very first page of the English text book for a primary one student. A similar joke popular among those one generation younger would be to respond to any question expecting an answer in English with “I go to school by bus”: in 2012, people on an online forum with mostly Cantonese-speakers began using this classic line from a Longman primary one English textbook from the 1990s as a nonsensical reply to confuse others and to make fun of their own English proficiencies.
Despite English being one of the two official languages taught in every school in Hong Kong, being able or unable to use it well is a complicated issue that involves race, social class, public education policy regarding medium of instruction, education background of one’s parents and many other touchy subjects. Even I, a faan1 syu1 mui6 (番書妹) — a girl who studied in an English-as-medium-of-instruction school, who put in years of effort into learning English as a second language, find myself on the receiving end of little hostile remarks from Cantonese speakers targeting my fluency in English every now and then.
Yes, I have friends who were genuinely grateful for my help with their IELTS preparation and proofreading their cover letters for school enrollment. But I also had a friend stop talking to me because they decided that my real friends were those who spoke English better than they did. I could only understand that as taking out their insecurities on me: after years of being ostracised in school for being a nerd, flaunting my academic achievements is the last thing I feel comfortable doing. If anything, writing these little essays in English is still a small but constant battle against imposter syndrome.
Luckily, Phoebe is not like them: she is very secure in her level of English and would happily join me in a game of Scrabble, send me memes that only make sense in English and tease me for my imperfect English when I made a mistake. When I showed her the first paragraph of this essay, she said: “Get rid of the past tense, I’m still alive.” Now I would update the paragraph with the knowledge of grammar we learned in the same school with the same English textbook, deleting some “ed”s and joking to Phoebe: “Fine, I’m resurrecting you right now.” Problem solved, friendship still intact, like a string of uncut chicken intestines.