香港/高雄 notes: The languages on this trip

Hi guys. Barely a week after I got back from Taipei, I'm off to Barcelona tomorrow for work, I'll be attending the Global ABS 2018 conference there. I'm hoping that this will be a fun trip and I'm trying to learn as much Catalan as I can before getting there - not that I will need it at the event of course (which will be mostly entirely in English) but as I will be visiting the world's biggest Catalan speaking city, I thought it would be rude not to make an effort to even try to speak any Catalan. Given that Catalonia is still trying to break away from Spain, I thought perhaps it would be unwise to just assume that people would be happy to speak Spanish with me and if I struggled on in Catalan, maybe the locals would be more willing to deal with me in English. Let's see - I have been to Barcelona in the past and simply got away with Spanish without using any Catalan, but that was years ago and well, I'm reflecting on my recent experiences in Hong Kong;  if you want to see more photos and videos from that trip (as well as Barcelona), you can check out my Instagram. 

Of all the places I went to on this trip, Hong Kong was certainly the place where I felt most comfortable given that it was the most English speaking of all the locations and there were so many things that reminded me of Singapore (Watsons, Food Republic, ToastBox, Breadtalk etc). Very little English was spoken in China, Macau and Taiwan, but Hong Kong was a former British colony so plenty of people spoke English anyway. I could easily ask for directions in the streets and get someone to help me in English - however, being me, I just had to speak Cantonese. Like why should I speak English with the locals in Hong Kong when I can practice my Cantonese? Now I grew up as a Hokkien speaker, I never really learnt Cantonese until I was an adult - I only really made a real effort with the language when I knew that I was going on this trip. However, given that I speak Mandarin and Hokkien, my brain actually clicked with Cantonese pretty quickly. Since I was picking Cantonese up through the internet, I was able to learn it at my own pace and it did prove to be incredibly useful on this trip. Not everyone spoke English in Hong Kong and Macau - I was fond of the street markets and often, the only language spoken there was Cantonese. I became confident enough to even bargain with the hawkers in a mix of Cantonese and English. Here's the golden rule: don't speak Mandarin in Hong Kong, you don't want them to think that you're from China and I'd rather struggle on in Cantonese than to just give up and speak English with them.

Ironically, the locals do speak some Mandarin - it seems almost inevitable in somewhere like Macau where over two-thirds of the tourists there are from mainland China. I remember the night when I arrived in Macau - I had rushed from the ferry terminal to go see the House of Dancing Water, then I had to make my way across Macau to the hotel and check in. By the time I had put my bags in the room, it was already 11 pm and I still haven't had dinner. I found my way to this 大排檔 'dai pai dong' in an alleyway and it looked like the only place that was opened at that hour. There was no way the old lady there spoke any English, so I  managed to negotiate my way around her menu (all written in traditional Chinese) and ordered - I was pretty proud of myself and her food was so authentically Cantonese. Sure the place was a bit dirty but it was the exactly kind of experience I wanted to have in Macau and Hong Kong. As I was enjoying my fried noodles and prawns, a group of mainland Chinese people came in and sat down next to me - they barked orders at the old lady in Mandarin and made no effort to speak any Cantonese with her. I was shocked at their attitude but to my surprise, the old lady actually spoke Mandarin with them (they were paying customers after all). Whilst there was a part of me that thought, I could have spoken Mandarin with her but another part of me thought it was far more fun doing it in Cantonese. You can see why the mainland Chinese people like that would piss off the locals in Macau and Hong Kong.

When I was in Macau, I did try really hard to find anyone who would speak Portuguese with me but to no avail. Given that the two official languages there are Portuguese and Cantonese, I reckoned that my Portuguese was actually a lot better than my Cantonese. I can understand a lot more Cantonese than I can actually speak - this is fairly common with Mandarin speakers and the same apply for my Portuguese, since I do speak Spanish fairly well. But no, I couldn't find a single person, not even in the tourist office who would speak any Portuguese with me. I did go into the Macau Public Library and found not one, but three Portuguese newspapers - I even made the effort to read them to check that they are not just Portuguese newspapers from Lisbon and indeed, they were written and published locally in Macau. Now that's a lot of effort for a language spoken by just 0.6% of the population, but yet so much money is spent making sure the language retains a visible presence on the streets of Macau: signs are bilingual and even the announcements in the elevators are made in Portuguese (along with Cantonese). But really, the two most spoken languages in Macau after Cantonese are Mandarin (because of the presence of large number of mainland Chinese migrant workers and tourists) and English (which is the default lingua franca for everyone else). Yet it seems totally perplexing that they are so desperate to hold on to a language that no one in Macau seems to speak - is this just an elaborate marketing ploy to make Macau seem more exotic and European for the tourists, just to give them a little taste of Portuguese culture?

You may have read about when I had a total breakdown in Shenzhen on stage, when I crumbled in front of an audience when I had to do English to Mandarin live translation - oh it was a horrible experience. However, I definitely redeemed myself in Taiwan - I went to Kaohsiung in Southern Taiwan to see some important colleagues of mine and was expected to do a sales pitch entirely in Mandarin for them. The bad memories of my awful performance in Shenzhen were still fresh in my mind, but I actually did pretty well in Kaohsiung. No it wasn't that my Mandarin had somehow improved during this trip, I think I was simply determined not to allow myself to crumble. Allow me to give you a gymnastics analogy: when gymnasts lose their balance on the balance beam, they can do two things. They can either fight and struggle to stay on to avoid a fall, or they can just accept that nothing they can do can prevent a fall and just step off the beam, so that they can at least fall safely without hurting themselves. Now I invite you to watch the Youtube clip I have selected for you to illustrate this point: these are gymnasts who have fought and won the battle to stay on the beam.

In Shenzhen, I panicked and my mind went blank when I couldn't translate certain words into Mandarin. But in Kaohsiung, when I didn't know the words for certain phrases like 'ratings report', my merely used a few sentences to described what I meant even if there was a proper term in Chinese that a native speaker would use (评级报告). After all, I realized that it wasn't the standard of my Mandarin that was on trial in Kaohsiung, rather, I was a representative for my company and it was my company's products and services that the Taiwanese were interested in, rather than my ability to speak Mandarin. Sure I stumbled a few times in my sales pitch, but like the gymnast who wobbled on the beam, I found a way to regain my balance and avoided a fall each time. Every time I managed to convey a point despite struggling with the language, I became more confident and by the end of the sales pitch, I was gladly taking their questions and answering not just in Mandarin, but using plenty of Hokkien as well. Taiwanese Hokkien is somewhat different from the Hokkien we speak in Singapore, but they loved the fact that I could speak some Hokkien and by the end of the meeting, the phrase 'kakilang' (自己人) was used by the client - I had impressed them and yes, they were going to invest with us.

I suppose the moral of the story is that you can never be so good at what you do that you will never ever make a mistake, but when you do make a mistake, the key thing is to have the resolve to fight on rather than give up - the same way a gymnast corrects herself on the beam after a wobble rather than just fall off the apparatus. No, my Mandarin isn't great - it will never be as good as my English or French, but nonetheless it shouldn't stop me from trying to use it when the opportunity presents itself and having the right attitude and having enough confidence can make a world of a difference. I've actually blogged about gymnasts who are totally brilliant in the gym during training but crumble under pressure when you put them in front of an audience at a major competition. Heck, I've seen others who are far more brilliant than me deliver an awful sales pitch simply because they crumbled under pressure. I am feeling a lot more confident about my ability to use my Chinese language skills after that sales meeting in Kaohsiung. You know, I love shouting from the rooftop that I can't speak Chinese or that my Chinese sucks, but I am really only doing that just to annoy my parents in a passive-aggressive way. Actually after my stint in Taiwan, I realized my Mandarin is actually pretty okay and I'm now quite confident in using in - but please, don't tell my parents. I'm still telling them that I can't speak Chinese anymore. I don't want to give my dad the impression that I actually used my Chinese in Taiwan - I lied, I told them that I did all my meetings in Taiwan in English and that most Taiwanese all speak English pretty well these days.

So that's it from me on this topic. I will be spending the week in Barcelona and will be back next weekend, then I'm off to Estonia for my next business trip the week after - oh yeah, loads of traveling this year and I love it. Thankfully, the weather in Europe is still a lot cooler than in Asia despite the fact that it is already June and summer is well and truly upon us. What are your thoughts on this issue? Do you always make an effort with the local language when you travel, even in a place like Hong Kong where English is widely spoken? Have you ever tried to learn a new language (even just the basics phrases) just for a trip? Let me know what you think, leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.