Calling the wrong number is fine; people make mistakes and I don’t blame them. I have my share of individuals calling me and looking for someone foreign to me.
And so I just receive this phone call from this lady and it goes something like this in Hokkien:
“Eh eh wo di wa kao dian li liao”
In between trying to make sense what she is talking about, I recall some of my Hokkien vocab and I replied:
“Eh Kiam Pia ah!”
No la, I not so mean and fierce, instead I said:
” Eh lir ka chor tian wei liao”
Surprisingly, she replied this:
“Oh sorry sorry”
Nothing wrong right? But she replied in ENGLISH when I replied her in Hokkien.
Is my Hokkien that bad?
4 Comments
July 5, 2009 at 4:17 am
hahaha, i guess we’ve to make a special effort to brush up on our dialect. I feel strongly the importance to advocate the learning of our heritage. =] Surprisingly, if you try conversing in pure mandarin (with zero traces of English vocab) over the phone or sth, you’ll be appalled that u are monolingual afterall… haha! that actually happened to me!
July 5, 2009 at 9:32 am
haha..yeah it’s kinda sad that we are losing our ethnic roots but hey, globalisation pays so something got to give. haha
well, i do understand my dialect but speaking it is really tough
July 8, 2009 at 11:23 am
there’s a difference between globalisation and subjecting blindly to influence… i think we can be exposed to cultures from all over the world, yet keep some of the heritage close to our hearts. i guess it’s more of how much we want it. Sadly at the place we currently reside, many do not cherish their own roots, to be very honest. practise your dialect with your elders, it’ll be fun! =]
July 10, 2009 at 5:25 am
haha true..nobody makes the effort to trace back their roots anymore
i went back to my hometown in 2005. haha quite a nice and relaxing place. the women were the ones working and the men were, well, i didn’t see them around much. haha
hainan island is a nice place to go for a holiday