Of visibility and vocab
Visibility has been less than 5km all week. It's like someone covered the city with a giant white bowl. Or pasted cut-out pictures of trees and buildings on a greying sheet of paper. Everything's tinged with smoke. Eucalyptus trees burn like pine trees, and the forests around Melbourne are covered in them. My grandparents came within inches of losing their house in the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires. The hydrangeas along the back wall were singed; if they'd drawn the blinds over the back windows the whole place would have gone. We visited Macedon a month after the fires, and the line of old shops where my grandfather used to take me were a crumbling plain of ash. I found a silver puddle turned solid in the charcoal, which was probably the remains of a motorbike.
I've been swimming in the sea just about every day. It's close by, and these days I can organise child-free windows with relative ease. I use sunscreen, and try to avoid peak UV, but my skin is still slowly turning browner. I tan beautifully: legacy of my Eurasian heritage. Not that the Chinese side approve of such things. The last time I saw my Chinese grandmother (she died a few years ago), she shook her head in emphatically when she saw me. I was visiting Penang on the way home from China, and my limbs and face were tanned. We had no common language, but my uncle translated her admonishing cries of "You shouldn't get so dark - you look like a Malay!" from Hokkien. Ah, Malaysia, haven of interracial harmony.
The visit was an interesting exercise in how little language you need to have a workable conversation. I probably know 30 words or less in Hokkien, but they're key words, pronouns, common nouns and verbs, basic constructions. When no-one was available to translate, she spoke in Hokkien and I spoke in Mandarin, and we both understood enough to get by. These days the smaller Chinese dialects are being quashed in Singapore and Malaysia. You haven't been allowed to broadcast or publish in them for years, and they're no longer taught anywhere. The Chinese people there under 30 or so all speak Mandarin instead, with whatever smattering of dialect they're picked up from their parents. In a generation's time, they'll be just about dead. Cantonese will hang on longest, because of Hong Kong, but from all accounts since Hong Kong returned to China, the Chinese government have been angling to replace it with Mandarin. When I visited Hong Kong last, I noted that the trilingual announcements on the subway, once ordered Cantonese, English, Mandarin, had changed to Cantonese, Mandarin, English. Give it another decade, and Mandarin will no doubt take the lead.
I've been swimming in the sea just about every day. It's close by, and these days I can organise child-free windows with relative ease. I use sunscreen, and try to avoid peak UV, but my skin is still slowly turning browner. I tan beautifully: legacy of my Eurasian heritage. Not that the Chinese side approve of such things. The last time I saw my Chinese grandmother (she died a few years ago), she shook her head in emphatically when she saw me. I was visiting Penang on the way home from China, and my limbs and face were tanned. We had no common language, but my uncle translated her admonishing cries of "You shouldn't get so dark - you look like a Malay!" from Hokkien. Ah, Malaysia, haven of interracial harmony.
The visit was an interesting exercise in how little language you need to have a workable conversation. I probably know 30 words or less in Hokkien, but they're key words, pronouns, common nouns and verbs, basic constructions. When no-one was available to translate, she spoke in Hokkien and I spoke in Mandarin, and we both understood enough to get by. These days the smaller Chinese dialects are being quashed in Singapore and Malaysia. You haven't been allowed to broadcast or publish in them for years, and they're no longer taught anywhere. The Chinese people there under 30 or so all speak Mandarin instead, with whatever smattering of dialect they're picked up from their parents. In a generation's time, they'll be just about dead. Cantonese will hang on longest, because of Hong Kong, but from all accounts since Hong Kong returned to China, the Chinese government have been angling to replace it with Mandarin. When I visited Hong Kong last, I noted that the trilingual announcements on the subway, once ordered Cantonese, English, Mandarin, had changed to Cantonese, Mandarin, English. Give it another decade, and Mandarin will no doubt take the lead.