Language Barriers

{In Sham Shui Po on the Kowloon side where there is not much English spoken or seen}

A question that I used to get asked many times back in Canada was: where are you from? I would get frustrated with this question and would almost always answer with "I'm from here", knowing that the inquirer really wanted to know what my cultural background is. I am Asian, there is no mistaking that. However, I do not see myself as any less Canadian than anyone else who was born and raised in Canada. 

{The English we did find on the Kowloon side was questionable...}

The desire to "belong" has been something that I have been struggling with all of my life. In Canada, I am never seen as just "Canadian", and when I visited my parents' home country of Vietnam, I was seen as a foreigner. Here in Hong Kong, however, it's been different. Everyone that I meet here assumes that I am a "Hong Konger", so everyone speaks to me in Cantonese, thinking that I understand everything that is being said. I wish I did understand Cantonese, though, on a particularly distressing occasion a couple of weeks ago...

During our second week in Hong Kong, I had a number of job interviews lined up after applying to posts for English teaching positions. One of the jobs I applied to asked me to come for an interview in the Kowloon Tong neighbourhood on the Kowloon side, off of the island. The trip to my interview was a bit of a disaster. We had gotten to the Kowloon side with no issues as we took the MTR (a mode of transportation that we are now accustomed to using). It was only after we were dropped off by our taxi driver in the middle of Kowloon Tong, not even anywhere near the place I needed to be for the interview, that we realised Hong Kong was not as bilingual as we thought it to be. He would speak to us in Cantonese, and we would speak to him in English, without either party understanding the other. The problem was that we only knew the address we were trying to get to in English, and the English version of street names here are vastly different from their Cantonese ones. At that point in time, neither of us (my fiancé and I) had phone plans, therefore looking up where we were in Kowloon Tong was not possible. Needless to say, we were both very angry at the taxi driver for leaving us in the middle of a place that we were not familiar with, not to mention the fact that there were no English signs to be seen, and no English-speakers around to help us.

To make a long story short, I eventually made it to my interview, albeit late, with the help of another (re: more clever) taxi driver who called someone who could speak English to us over her cellphone. The lesson, however, is that we really need to brush up on our (almost non-existent) Cantonese. It was a reminder that we are living in Hong Kong, and English does not always work, at least not that we have seen on the Kowloon side. And, if all else fails, our destinations must be written down in Cantonese prior to choosing to take a taxi. Lesson learned.