Chinese-Canadian Experience
Talk DimSum Thing
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2betterthanchocolate
Well, here's some food for thought! In the city of Toronto, where over 100 languages and dialects are spoken daily, Chinese ranked among the top 15 languages by mother tongue in 2001, coming in third (no specific dialect specified) and fourth (Cantonese) after English and Italian at 165,000+ and 145,000+ speakers respectively out of 4.6 million respondents from the city.
I was pretty surprised when I found this out.
(City of Toronto website, http://www.toronto.ca/quality_of_life/diversity.htm)
I was pretty surprised when I found this out.
(City of Toronto website, http://www.toronto.ca/quality_of_life/diversity.htm)
3mvrdrk
That's cool! I want to live in Toronto! Well ... Vancouver is closer and the food is fabulous ...
4betterthanchocolate
Currently reading Wayson Choy's novel of growing up in Vancouver Chinatown, All That Matters. It's excellent. A more mature effort than his first novel The Jade Peony. Here's an excerpt:
"When I was three years old,... I was sent away from our Toishan village to Hong Kong, sent away by the Patriarch Chen, who was recently a Mission House convert and the head of our clan. As a demonstration of his Christian charity, the old Patriarch had agreed to clear the way for Third Uncle to sponsor us to come to Canada, so that Father, Grandmother and I, First Son, would have a chance to escape the famine and the civil wars raging in the Pearl River Delta of Kwantung province.
...
"Much later, I learned that before he put up the money and bought the documents for us to join him in Vancouver, Third Uncle had to consider the feelings of his dead wife. He consulted Chinatown's Madame Jing, who set up her fortune-telling table in Market Alley and had known him since he arrived in Gold Mountain. She interpreted the final toss of the I Ching coins.
"'The spirit of your dead wife approves,' she said."
--Sometimes in novels of the immigrant experience, the translations of kinship relationships, Canadian place names in Chinese, and other terms into English can be awkward. I think Choy handles them well, here. Recommended (and I'm only 1/3 through!)
"When I was three years old,... I was sent away from our Toishan village to Hong Kong, sent away by the Patriarch Chen, who was recently a Mission House convert and the head of our clan. As a demonstration of his Christian charity, the old Patriarch had agreed to clear the way for Third Uncle to sponsor us to come to Canada, so that Father, Grandmother and I, First Son, would have a chance to escape the famine and the civil wars raging in the Pearl River Delta of Kwantung province.
...
"Much later, I learned that before he put up the money and bought the documents for us to join him in Vancouver, Third Uncle had to consider the feelings of his dead wife. He consulted Chinatown's Madame Jing, who set up her fortune-telling table in Market Alley and had known him since he arrived in Gold Mountain. She interpreted the final toss of the I Ching coins.
"'The spirit of your dead wife approves,' she said."
--Sometimes in novels of the immigrant experience, the translations of kinship relationships, Canadian place names in Chinese, and other terms into English can be awkward. I think Choy handles them well, here. Recommended (and I'm only 1/3 through!)
