This blog is named CHINA DROLL, apparently it's a clever word-play by its author, Cecilie. From what Sham-Shui-Po Boy can gather, if you see this blond blogger in person, she actually resembles a Barbie Doll instead of a China Doll. Cecilie is a Norwegian expat, a teacher of English to the HK Chinese natives and of Cantonese to the Westerners living in Hong Kong. According to her web site, she's trying to make Cantonese a "world language". It's a daunting task, no doubt.

        CHINA DROLL is a garden-variety blog; some would incline to call it, "a blog of constant complaints". Cecilie and her close circle of expat friends rant about Hong Kong, China and Chinese on almost everything under the sun. The same small cast of characters regularly writes the same banal type of predictable comments in her blog, usually using noticeable British slang in distinguishable British English. On the other hand, being an English language teacher, quite unexpectedly, Cecilie does make her blog stand out in a way, because of the way she writes. It's interesting, to say the least, to see how she expresses herself in the very language she teaches.


Her October 15, 2008 entry, in part:

"So basically, there's no way HK people can learn good English when the primary level textbooks are written by jumped-up morons who think their face is dead in the water if they run what they have self-importantly written, by a person who can actually read and write English."


        Without getting into specifics, it appears that Cecilie has a competent editor for her other writing, but not for her blog. Sham-Shui-Po Boy simply hopes Cecilie's Cantonese is more eloquent than her form of English that she showcases in CHINA DROLL.


In the same entry:

"why is Hong Kong people's English so crap."


        It's certainly not unreasonable for one to expect that an English language teacher would not be using a noun in place of an adjective in a simple sentence. Perhaps, the Westerners, or at least some, do speak that way in private, Sham-Shui-Po Boy has no way of knowing, since he has zero social interaction with them (not uncommon for a HK Chinese native, Sham-Shui-Po Boy is not antisocial, he is convivial). There is no way for him to know how they talk in slang within their own segregated social circle. Nor does he know if Cecilie speaks English with an accent as thick, heavy, and prominent as his (two different kinds of accents, of course).

        There are other examples one can easily find throughout this blog, Sham-Shui-Po Boy will not bring them up here, he does not want to belabor the point. When it comes to writing bad English, he is guilty of it many times over. But both Cecilie and Sham-Shui-Po Boy have a good excuse for their spotty language skills: English is not their mother tongue.

        Sham-Shui-Po Boy says, the entries of CHINA DROLL along with its readers' comments are a gold mine for learning about a certain small segment of Hong Kong's population --- namely, these Westerners' mentality.