Saturday school—how I do not miss you. Looking back on my former days of Velcro shoes and Disney knapsacks, I recall my many attempts to learn Cantonese. Ok, rephrase: it was more my parents’ attempt to get their English-speaking kid to reconnect with the motherland, Hong Kong.
Saturday school wasn’t much fun because us kids were already burnt out from regular school. The teachers usually had to fight for our attention. There was one teacher who frequently stood on a desk and screamed “Shut up!” in Cantonese. That was one phrase the kids and I remembered very well. There was another teacher whom we were fonder of. She bribed us with candy and stickers, so we played her game and sat still. We didn’t learn much, but we certainly got a little chubbier.
Despite my lack of skills in writing and reading, I was able to speak quite well. I got the street talk down. I didn’t have much of an English accent. My secret … I watched TV, a lot of Cantonese TV. Every night, I curled up on the couch next to Mom and watched TVB dramas. TVB was and still is one of the leading stations in Hong Kong. Their dramas didn’t have groundbreaking visuals or masterful plots. They were just entertaining in a guilty pleasure kind of way. For me, it was a great chance to brush up on my Cantonese without using much of my brain.
TVB dramas are pretty much the same today. They usually recycled plot lines like a street urchin becomes a CEO to avenge his dead mother. Or people in an office sit around, gossip, flirt, and scheme for promotions. Let us not forget the new police officer who starts out as a klutz and later manages to solve every case. Finally, my personal favourite: a helpless boy in ancient China becomes a kung-fu master, saves the kingdom, and marries a beautiful maiden. All because he knows how to wield a bad-ass sword.
After elementary school, I watched fewer TVB dramas due to my sudden craze for anything Japanese. When I got into university, I turned my attention to American and British dramas, so I felt out of touch with Hong Kong culture and my Cantonese was getting rusty. My immediate prescription was one TVB series per holiday. Now, I feel well enough to go to a Dim Sum place and speak very loudly about how I knew all along that the boy with the dragon sword was the Emperor’s illegitimate son.
If any of you folks want to brush up on a second language, I highly recommend your nearest cable connection. It works guaranteed.
Chinese school image courtesy of ‘cleverClaire’ under Creative Commons Licensing
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- Nancy Tam
3 comments
Ella says:
Jan 14, 2011
conrad says:
Jan 14, 2011
Growing up I always had friends who had "saturday" school – and I felt so so bad for them. Because that meant that they couldn't use their saturday morning to watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
But at the same time, I admired them not because of their academic vigor but because they had a longer saturday lol
filmbeats says:
Jan 26, 2011
There's a "fun" way to learn Chinese? I was forced to go to mandarin school on saturdays and cantonese on sundays and didn't learn more than a handful of characters in either dialect and I made even less friends (0). It was a horrible, isolating experience since I was the only one in any class I was in who didn't speak or understand any Chinese.