There goes the neighbourhood

This week my sis­ter and fam­ily came back from Toronto for the sum­mer, and one of the first cou­ple of things she asked was whether Jet Li had moved into our mother’s neigh­bour­hood yet.

I said I didn’t think so, because wild mon­keys that roam the area haven’t been poached for med­i­c­i­nal pur­poses yet.

Lately, con­ver­sa­tions around the house have veered dan­ger­ously into unhar­mo­nious ter­ri­tory, as we spoke about how it just isn’t right that sales staff at many shops now don’t speak any­thing but Main­land Chi­nese, and that when we Sin­ga­pore­ans exclaim, “wah lao, damn expen­sive, can?”, the same sales staff take it as a request and say, “can!” instead of com­mis­er­at­ing and claim­ing “boss, best price already”.

The last Jet Li inter­view in Eng­lish that I remem­ber was the one where he speaks about his role in Lethal Weapon 4:

“The direc­turr. He teow me. Prease dong hurk Meow”.

In stan­dard Eng­lish, it means, “Because I am such a kung fu stud, I might hurt mere mor­tals with just the touch of a fin­ger. The direc­tor of the movie was wor­ried that I might acci­den­tally injure what you peo­ple call an action movie star like Mel Gib­son”.”

Come on, man. If you want to be Sin­ga­porean and move here, at least man­gle Eng­lish like we do, can?

Dong take it per­son­ally and feel hurk, ok?

What they mean, “Jet Li no horse run”? I have horse what”.