Hong Kong English/Cantonese (XVI)

Be Careful. Hongkongers Become Polite All of a Sudden!

It’s dangerous. Thank you for your notice.

I believe that Hongkongers are famed to be kind but impolite. Some of the reasons are Cantonese, the language we speak, sounds threatening to non-speakers; and we are loud, even a warm greeting sounds like an argument to foreigners.

I got these confirmed from a friend from Taiwan who speaks Taiwanese and Mandarin. But recently I am so shocked that we Hongkongers are becoming polite recently.

Yes, just one, so it isn’t scientifically proved.

Because they say “thanks” all the time!

2 boxes thanks

First of all, it was the stupidity among some Hongkongers which made this phrase viral.

It was just last month when people in Hong Kong rushed to supermarkets and swept lots of stuff there, especially surgical masks, rice and toilet paper rolls.

Surgical masks are more essential for local people because we know it when we fought against SARS, another coronavirus taking nearly 300 lives in Hong Kong in 2003. When the masks were in short, we were very grateful that some local people tried all their best to get more masks worldwide for supply.

Hong Kong government did, as expected, nothing to help local residents get any masks with reasonable price. And then a lot of people went maniac when they found that many people posted on Facebook groups that they could get some surgical masks for other people in need.

The ones who posted it usually asked for a quantity so that they could bring just enough for the people and not disturbing too much on the local needs elsewhere. However, as I said some went maniac, they replied the quantities even when the posts were unrelated to the masks.

Two boxes of surgical masks are usually enough for a family to survive for a few months. Therefore, two boxes are the usual quantity for most Hong Kong people.

Therefore, a phrase “2 boxes, thx” (2盒 thx) and variants became popular for a few days because the people needed to tell the quantities to the other people regardless of their posts.

It is pitiful that this series of events went on, but it can be a sarcastic way to tell people how Hongkongers are unprepared for serious outbreak, how we went panicked from past experience and how we cannot trust our government anymore.

30000 thanks

I believe that the world knows Hongkongers put no trust in police anymore since last June. The police were caught on camera beating and cursing the protesters that they were the actual people who tore the harmony in the city into pieces.

In November 2019, when a protester was certified dead, the police went euphoric and told protesters on the streets that they were going to have champagne that night.

In return, when Hongkongers knew that a police officer was infected with Wuhan coronavirus, the city went euphoric and people chanted on Facebook that they were going to have champagne that night. Well, alcoholic drinks in supermarkets were under shortage on that day and the next.

Action speaks louder than words, I guess.

When local people found that that police officer went to a party with 60 more police as one in the party was retiring, it was like a celebration in Hong Kong and we wished all of the police suffer from Wuhan pneumonia.

Since the size of Hong Kong Police Force is a bit more than 30,000 people, we started to make use of “2 boxes thanks” to change it into “30000 thanks” as a wishful thinking for those cops to all be infected and wishfully dead.

Because of the difference in the counting system in Asian languages and western ones, we have a word for ten thousand and so “30000 thanks” usually becomes “三萬 (Jyutping: saam1 maan6) thanks”.

Oh yes, English has a rare word for ten thousand: myriad.

Some even suggested new scoring rules to win Mahjong in relations to the police.

If you don’t know much about Cantonese, you may have heard before that Cantonese swear words are so horrific. We have 5 main curse words to describe how human genitals work, and the combinations of those 5 words can express more, and are stronger as a curse.

However, if you know Cantonese enough, you will know that the strongest curse in Cantonese isn’t a curse, at all.

The biggest curses in Cantonese are wishes.

For example, when we want somebody to suffer, we wish that person “a hundred years of life (長命百歲)”. We also wish somebody’s whole family get rich (冚家富貴) as a curse to that person’s whole family.

Perhaps you can treat this as an irony. Literary devices are used so often in a lot of daily conversation, if you notice.

Corrupt cops, I wish your whole family best of luck. (黑警冚家祥. Some may argue that this is a euphemism from the phrase to curse the whole family to death, but anyway you get it.)

And if you are skeptical of wearing masks in public to prevent yourself from infecting viruses, ignoring the fact that there is a latency period in every single disease but they are still infectious, I wish you all the best.