Growing up speaking only Cantonese, I am always amazed by how quickly English has taken the place of my native language in the last six years – well, not completely. I still cannot pronounce ‘crisps’ properly. If you envy those of us who are bilingual, don’t. Instead of being able to manoeuvre between the two languages, most of the time we’re stuck in the middle, not good enough for either. If I could, I would have written this poem half in Chinese and half in English.

The Day I Found Out that I Drunk Talk in Cantonese

I don’t think the English me and the Cantonese me get along quite well.

Sometimes they have to speak together,

And my sentences get muddled up

In strange accen-s, sentence wrong structures and

My apologetic smile.

 

The English me is sarcastic, spontaneous and confident,

The Cantonese me is mild, self-disciplined and sentimental.

 

The Cantonese me never swears,

But the English me does. Oh yes, she does.

 

The English me is a heavy drinker,

The Cantonese me sips red wine from her dad’s glass.

 

My Cantonese me cannot write essays,

But my English me cannot pick a fight with her brother.

 

The English me mumbles when she eats her scrambled eggs wrapped in bacon,

The Cantonese me mumbles when she chews the preserved eggs in her congee.

 

The Cantonese me offends her parents,

Oh, and the English me has never met her parents.

 

The Cantonese me stutters,

The English me also stutters.

 

Do not mistake me for being two-faced,

I am just torn.

Too foreign for here, too foreign for home.

Drifting through continents,

Through life,

Like post-colonial Hong Kong,

Like my lovers’ tangled tongues when they pronounce my name,

Like the bad bubble tea (too sweet and the bubbles too hard) I found

In a rundown Chinese restaurant on the street corner

That fails to translate yang zhou chao fan into English.

My Welsh-language education makes me privileged (and able to say so in Welsh)

But on the day I found out that I drunk talk in Cantonese,

I became whole.

My Drunken Consciousness,

Mixed with my gin-flavoured vomit,

Grows into long, long roots,

Extending themselves across oceans and lands,

Anchoring to the space underneath my bed at home,

Where my mum stores all my winter clothes,

That the English me has grown out of,

Unknowingly by nanometers,

When she dreams in Cantonese every night