I was writing about Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes for the South China Morning Post when I came across the funniest one-star review of the book:

This is a bad book. It is sad and a horrible book. Do not pick up this book. If you want to read it, now you know it is a bad book. I do not recommend it. If you are thinking of going to the book store and wasting your money on a book like this, forget about it. But I’ll tell you about it anyway. It is about a girl named Sadako who gets very sick. She has a friend named Chizuko. She is Sadako’s best friend. Sadako is a fast runner. She gets leukemia and goes to the hospital. Chizuko tells her that if she makes a thousand cranes, she will not have leukemia. Her brother promises to hang the cranes. Will she make one thousand?

I want this kid to review everything. Hey kid, what did you think of the new Strokes album?

Both JP and JN sent me this video, which features a Cantonese speaker attempting to give an interview in Mandarin on the financial markets…but for the most part he’s speaking in Cantonese, with a couple of Mandarin words thrown in. At one point, he feels he can only communicate what he has to say in English. Dear lord, it’s comic gold—it’s so very Hong Kong. He says, “他是 not too good, not too bad.” (“He is not too good, not too bad.”) Oh man, it’s so classic. JN and I salute the interviewer for being a consummate professional, because both of us would have died laughing in the middle of taping. We’re not quite sure why the man didn’t just respond in Cantonese to begin with.

I wonder if this is how I sound whenever I throw in an English word for every Cantonese or Mandarin word I don’t know. (The best is when I do interviews where I have to talk about deconstruction in Cantonese—it’s a laugh a minute. The people whom I interview are always very kind about the fact that my Canto isn’t exactly formal or academic. I sound like I learned how to speak the language from angry boys in Mong Kok, which isn’t exactly charming on a woman.)

And for extra comic sizzle, whoever uploaded the video on YouTube notes that the interviewee’s spoken Mandarin is “even more for real” than Louis Koo’s attempts at the language. (Louis Koo is famous for being hilarious at Mandarin, so much so that the fact is a plot point in a Johnnie To’s Triad Election.)