January 11, 2007 Archives

Also, one of the music tapes my father recovered was taped over with a minute and a half of a conversation we had while playing mini-golf, with grandma. Either me or my brother spoke exquisitely cute baby Cantonese, minus the twenty years of acculturation from today. With the "wor" and "ma", we sounded like genuine Cantonese, not this distorted chimera of Chinese, English, French mix. My father sounds a lot like me, his voice clearer and a lot less mature. My mother sounds like her youngest sister. My grandma, well, sounds like my grandma. :D

It's ironic that the song being taped over is some patriotic song in Cantonese called "Ngor hei chung kwok yan" (I am Chinese). It's interesting to know that we were so frighteningly Chinese in the language we spoke, and lets me think that something from my early childhood makes me fond of hearing Cantonese sounds (I have the vocabulary of a 8 years old'er, and none of the colloquial).