Zhanghua Yuanlin (彰化員林) accent

My wife has a cousin who is a lawyer in San Francisco. Despite the fact that he has lived all his life in the United States, he speaks Taiwanese Hokkien (Hoklo, Amoy, Southern Min) fluently. How fluently? I would say much more fluent than someone of the same age who has lived in Taiwan all his life. He can make a speech in Hokkien ad lib. But there's one marked feature in his Hokkien: A Yuanlin accent.

Yuanlin accent probably is one of the very few accents that have features conncected only to one locality in Taiwan. Other marked accents, for example those closer to Quanzhou accent can be heard in many places along the west coast. Those markedly close to Zhangzhou accent can be heard in Yilan as well as in the south.

The special feature of the Yuanlin accent is that "eng" is pronounced as /eng/. So people say: "ki-a-BENG, BENG-BENG LENG-LENG. (枝仔冰，冰冰冷冷。)"

What is more interesting is how this feature survived in cousin's accent. His mother grew up in Taichung City, with her roots in Zhanghua. Her father had worked in Yuanlin for a time, and that's how he picked up the feature. Cousin's mother then immigrated to the United States while she was still relatively young.

Had she stayed in Taiwan, I think this feature could have disappeared by assimilation to the mainstream Taiwan accent, which is to pronounce "ing" as /ing/ or /ieng/. And had the cousin grown up in Taiwan, he could have lost Hokkien altogether in favour of Mandarin.

This is similar to how Hokkien-speaking girls in Taiwan tend to preserve marked features than men, because they seldom use the language outside of their own families. This is a topic I will write about some other time.

Sacred Heart Cathedral: IAWE conference in Hong Kong and Guangzhou (Day 4-2)

After the end of the conference, I hurried to the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart to attend the anticipated mass. Thanks to Wendy's help, I was able to take the bus and find the place easily. The area seemed to be the old trading part of Guangzhou with many small warehouses and shops. The building there are very similar to ones seen in places like Kuala Lumpur, where a lot of Cantonese people migrated to. I love old southern Chinese shop houses. I wish I had more time to explore the old part of Guangzhou. Another reason to go back.

The Cathedral was built by the Paris Foreign Mission, just like many churches in Japan. So it has a familiar French Gothic feel, similar to the one in, for example, Ho Chi Minh City. A bit different from the Spanish style more prevalent in Taiwan, Xiamen and the Philippines. 

Back of the church. Renovated very well. When I first visited the St. Ignatius Church in Shanghai back in 1997, it was quite dilapidated with bullet holes still visible on the wall, possible caused by the red guards during the cultural revolution. But the condition here and now seems even better than the cathedral in Saigon. 

The church was packed with young people. I noticed that most of them were non-Catholics just visiting. It seems that there are quite a lot of young people who are interested to "come and see" to find out about the Christianity. There were also quite a lot of catechetical materials being distributed at the entrance of he church. I often hear the argument in Taiwan that the general apathy among the youth toward religion is because of affluence. But Guangzhou is not much less affluent than Taipei! 

Look how well-dressed those children are. Another evidence of the high standard of living in Guangzhou.

After feeding the spirit, now it's time to feed the stomach. I went into the first restaurant I saw after coming out of the gate of the church. A 小菜 made with potatoes is very uncommon in Taiwan. Taiwanese people regard potatoes to be something foreign. That's why it's called 洋芋. On the other hand, 土豆, which literally means "local bean" and used for potatoes in the mainland, means peanuts in Taiwan. I don't think many users of "土豆網" in Taiwan know that they are using the "Potato Net", though...

Even in the world capital of MSG, the wave of health freak food is coming...

I know I'm not in Beijing, but I have to eat this at least once whenever I'm in any part of China. Thanks to the presence of migrant workers from northern China, one could get good zhajiangmian even in Guangdong.

I was quite surprised that I had to pay nearly NT$200 for this dinner for one. And I don't think I got ripped off, like most foreigners used to do in the past in China. It just shows that food in Guangzhou is really no cheaper than Taipei. (I was going to check out a massage place after this, like I always used to do whenever I visited China. ) 

 

Wendy was so kind as to get those shouxin (sauseun; Cantonese for souvenir) for me, and brought them all the way to the venue of the conference. I appreciated it very much, because I really had no time to do any shopping at all. Thank you, Wendy! A kind of old southern Chinese shophouses is featured in the packaging of the first shouxin.

By the way, if you are in Guangzhou area right now, I strongly urge you to visit the cathedral at least once. It's well worth a visit!

(To be continued)