I don’t fit in Hong Kong. Physically that is. Actually, this isn’t a fair statement. I should say I am far too clumsy to walk anywhere in Hong Kong without oafishly knocking everything over. I am sure somebody much more graceful and elegant than myself would get by just fine. To make matters worse my Cantonese is bad enough that when I apologize for my clumsiness I’m probably saying something completely unintended and possibly offensive. A good example of this would be when I was corrected for my pronunciation of lobster balls while ordering food from a street vendor. Apparently I just kept shouting shrimp vagina over and over again.
Every day I wish I could be bilingual. I desperately want to understand all of the conversations going on around me, even the ones I have no connection to. While waiting in line, sitting on the bus, waiting on uncomfortably small chairs for my food to arrive, or walking through crowded streets I want nothing more than to understand what everybody is saying.
But why? Ironically, after 28 years of living in English speaking countries I’ve developed incredibly powerful selective hearing. I ignore just about everything everybody says in English because I know from experience that the vast majority of conversation happening around me are painfully uninteresting. Even knowing this, I can’t help but wonder about every word ever spoken in Cantonese within earshot of me. Next time you go out to dinner I want you to listen to how incredibly dull the conversations around you are and think about how boring the conversations at your table must be to other people.
Most of my recent dinners have been with my girlfriend’s family and entirely in Cantonese. This means I’ve been sitting at a table full of people talking, but I can’t understand anything they say. The feeling you get from an experience like this is difficult to describe, especially when it happens so frequently. It is like I am always eating alone, but surrounded by people I know. Sometimes somebody will say something that makes everybody laugh, so I will laugh with them. Then I immediately feel like an ass and try to pretend like I laughed at something funny that happened somewhere else in the restaurant.
I don’t have an exceptionally long attention span, so this has started driving me slightly mad. At first I found myself staring for minutes at pieces of food or objects in the distance, but too often these objects end up being people that most definitely become uncomfortable with me gazing blankly at them for so long. Lately I’ve been developing coping mechanisms to deal with the boredom. One of my favorites is trying to guess what everybody is saying. This is actually more fun than it sounds, but usually ends with me trying to keep myself from laughing hysterically at something I imagined somebody might have said. This probably looks crazier than laughing along with the Cantonese conversations.
I’d be willing to bet my imagined conversations are infinitely more interesting than the actual conversations that transpire around me on the bus, at dinner, in line, in a crowd, etc. I hate the phrase “ignorance is bliss”, but it does have a certain truth here. Maybe my life is more interesting not understanding what the people around me are saying. As soon as I can understand Cantonese the mystery and wonder will disappear from these situations. My selective hearing will almost certainly kick in, and I will just go back to ignoring everything. I guess I should enjoy not enjoying the conversations around me while I can.
