Wow, I feel honouredamhoanna wrote:Here we go -- a Cantonese (or half-Cantonese) guy that prefers Hokkien to Mandarin!
.With regards to Cantonese, I have a small confession to make. For a lot of my life (until the early 90's) I was quite strongly anti-Cantonese. This was a result of many experiences in my youth (particularly between the ages of 16 and 30). In those days, I went frequently to Chinese restaurants in various parts of the world (in particular, London and Sydney). These were the places where I would inevitably run into Cantonese (i.e. the waiters and shop owners), and these encounters would generally be unpleasant. The basic tone of them would always be "you're obviously Chinese, you should damned well be able to speak Cantonese!". It sometimes got so nasty that they would refuse to serve me in any other language than Cantonese, and in doing so, they would make their contempt for me very clear.
My usual reaction to this attitude was "their variant isn't 'standard Chinese' either, who do they think they are?". On one or two occasions, I replied only in Hokkien (not very productive!), and sometimes I would just walk out of the restaurants. Other times we'd just struggle on with mutual antogonism on both sides.
Since the mid-90's this has changed considerably. With increasing globalisation, these restauranteurs probably come into contact with more and more Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese, ethnic Chinese Thais / Indonesians (or fair-skinned Thais), American-born Chinese, Australian-born Chinese, etc, who might also not speak any Cantonese. And a whole new generation of waitering staff has arisen (perhaps the children of these people who held me in such contempt) - much younger people, who grew up in the West, and hence didn't resent my not speaking Cantonese at all.
In any case, I realised somewhere in the mid to late 90's that the old friction in almost every encounter in a Chinese restaurant had - unnoticed by me - disappeared, and that I could just go into one and have a pleasant Chinese meal. I also realised that the old anti-Cantonese attitude I used to have was no longer relevant, and I no longer needed to have it!
[Also, I have since had similar unpleasant encounters with speakers from other groups - I think two such incidents have been posted on this Forum. One was a waitress in Singapore who refused to serve me in anything other than Mandarin, and the other was a janitor of a flat in Taiwan, who refused to speak to me (or acknowledge my existence) because (he'd heard from my friends who lived there, that) I didn't speak Mandarin. So, I guess I realised that "language-discrimination" exists in many other groups than just the Cantonese, and was more an individual than a group thing.]
So, these days, I don't have any anti-Cantonese feelings (aside perhaps from a slight sadness that their variant does so well on the world scale, compared to mine).
The period of my career and residence in Penang was, to be precise, between mid-February 1998 and mid-February 2004.