<Seven Days Book> Day 4 | Lingering in Cantonese songs, nostalgia

Strictly speaking, I am not a native Cantonese. My parents are from the north and south respectively. They met in Beijing and then moved to Shenzhen. I grew up in Shenzhen when I was one year old, but I know that Shenzhen is not considered as a native Cantonese by Cantonese people. I also learned to be dutiful and rarely say that I am a Cantonese in public, especially in front of Cantonese people.

Neither of my parents speak Cantonese, but when I went to Hong Kong as a kid, my mom would roll her eyes when she heard shop assistants verbally confirming "mainlanders" or people on the subway saying "Northern girls". When I was in school, I was influenced by the Cantonese children and started to speak Cantonese, but I always made a fool of myself. For example, I would say "snow" as "blood" and "interest" as "sexual interest". Later, I no longer used Mandarin homophones in Cantonese.

My Cantonese improved rapidly in the UK. I was 17 years old that year, and I couldn't find a common language with most of the kids from the mainland, so I mixed with the Hong Kong students. I joined their clubs, sang karaoke with them, and watched TVB dramas with them, which made me feel a sense of belonging. There were several New Years and Christmases, and I spent them with them in order to avoid drinking and bragging with a bunch of mainland students I didn't know. In this way, my Cantonese improved rapidly, at least to the point where I would not be given the cold shoulder by the store clerks when I went shopping in Hong Kong.

The complex meaning of Cantonese to me began to emerge after I left school. My parents came to Shenzhen in the early 1990s. At that time, Hong Kong had not yet returned to China, and there was still a considerable gap between the income levels of coastal mainland China and Hong Kong. The revolution had not yet broken out in Hong Kong. People who went to Shenzhen at that time were attracted by the dividends of reform. The income and opportunities were better than those in the mainland. However, when they went to Hong Kong, they felt the class gap and naked contempt. My mother has lived in Shenzhen for nearly 40 years. She still talks about the time before the return of China. She only earned a few hundred or a thousand yuan in a public unit. It was rare for her to go to Hong Kong to buy clothes, but she was laughed at in the face by the clerk of Marks & Spencer: "This sweater is 680 yuan, can you afford it?" Many years later, Shenzhen's economy has developed by leaps and bounds. The story of "not being able to afford a sweater" has become a joke, but every time my mother and I walk on the streets of Hong Kong, I can still feel her persistent remembrance of the shame of the past, so much so that she always uses derogatory language such as "a tiny place" to talk about Hong Kong.

But looking back at me, I have been influenced by Hong Kong culture since I was a child, watching TVB and listening to Cantonese songs. Later, it became convenient to travel to Hong Kong on my own. I can speak some Cantonese, have cultural affinity, and like the rule of law and efficiency of this city. Naturally, I fell in love with it and cared about its fate. When I was in college, I had friends from the mainland who went to Hong Kong to study. It was during the Umbrella Movement for genuine universal suffrage in Hong Kong. As a mainland student who does not speak Cantonese, I find it difficult to empathize with the internal contradictions, shocks, and even traumas they experienced. At that time, I realized that Cantonese meant more to me than a pass, a pass that allowed me to approach this culture inside and outside, and its identity memory.

In the nearly ten years that followed, my affinity with Cantonese and Cantonese culture made me more willing to get closer to Hong Kong culture and movies, and to understand Hong Kong politics and movements. Memories related to Cantonese include love, and the "Lonely Christmas" that I played on repeat countless times on lovelorn nights in a foreign country. I fell in love with Wong Kar-wai and Johnnie To because of Cantonese, and I also fell in love with binge-watching Infernal Affairs on boring weekday nights, wondering if Liu Jianming, who always looked at himself in the mirror, was the struggling self in another time and space.

Now I am in the United States. My body and language have been separated from the most comfortable soil. My sense of belonging and control over life has disappeared. I often feel like my soul is out of my body and I don’t know where to go back. I am like standing in the middle of a turbulent river without a language. On one side is a trap that loses freedom, and on the other side is loneliness that cannot be attached. I finally accept that whether it is my motherland or a foreign country, it is irrelevant at this moment. In order to be understood and loved, I kept explaining and shouting until I was exhausted and could not make any sound.

On the days when I am most exhausted, the Cantonese playlist in the car has become my most peaceful retreat. When my hands are on the steering wheel, I am in control of the speed and direction, but my thoughts are brought to a quiet place by the Cantonese songs I hummed as a child. There is no tension of censorship between us, and it does not require me to prove my innocence. We are like two passers-by who are very close to each other, enjoying each other's company, but not bound by the burden of emotions and the weight of right and wrong. This is the relationship with the least expectations, and also the most peaceful relationship.

Perhaps, getting lost in the Cantonese melody means getting lost in my childhood’s simple love for that small city and my persistence in fairness and autonomy.