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Chinese culture is intrinsically poor or has less to give than the English language or Western culture. Far from it, it is just that except for the missionaries who came to China, there was little incentive on the part of westerners to learn the language. And the contact of Chinese immigrants with Americans resulted only in a few phonetic loans associated with certain aspects of material civilization e.g. chopsuey, and terms like tong. And in the Hong Kong context more of the local population has adopted western ways than the expatriates have adopted Chinese ones. The expatriates in Hong Kong, unlike immigrants into a new society, rarely attempt to genuinely assimilate the local culture. As a consequence they accept far fewer cultural loans. But given the number of words of Indian origin entering English and attaining varying degrees of integration during British rule in India, I cannot say with certainty that this attitudinal factor is a strong cause for the paucity of Chinese loan words in English. And there are expatriates who are exceptions to the general rule. In some cases, out of a disinterested desire to integrate or to know more about the place in which they live, or out of a desire for professional advancement, or because of a mixture of motives, expatriates do learn the language and culture. Moreover, with the changing situation of Hong Kong, attitudes of native speakers of English to the Chinese language are undergoing perceptible changes.
(4) Absence of a Single Dominant Form of the Lending Language.
Up until the last War, expatriate exposure to Chinese was to a mixture of mutually unintelligible Chinese 'dialects'. Of expatriates resident in China between 1870 and 1940 approximately one-third lived in areas where they were exposed particularly to Cantonese (in Hong Kong, Canton, Macao), another third in areas exposed particularly to Shanghainese, and the rest partly in areas exposed to Mandarin (in Peking, Tientsin, Wuhan, etc.) and partly in areas exposed to Min dialects