[
    {
        "id": 211468,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1988",
        "page_number": 184,
        "title": "RAS-1988",
        "content_text": "160\n\nBy the time Helen was learning to crawl, Father had a two-bedroom house built with the help of his cousin, Chan Ngit Chiu, and a few of his carpenter friends. They ended up stealing some of the lumber and leaving part of the house interior unpainted. This was something Father should have foreseen, since Ngit Chiu was an opium addict. It did not bother us much for we were utterly happy to be in a new home of our own. This was a two-bedroom house located on Board Road, which ran off Buckle Lane, an area where many upward mobile Chinese had relocated after the Chinatown fire, such families as the Wei's, Lee Lit's, Yee Mun Wai's, Lam Toy's, Lam Quan's, Yee Yap's, C. K. Ai's, to name a few. The narrow roads were of dirt and gravel and I often nursed a scraped and bleeding knee when I fell while running home on the slight incline.\n\nA right-of-way in front of our house led to the home of a Chung family and to a newly-built home of Chun Sun Kee adjoining our lot. Across the way was a very large L-shaped property owned by David Notley, an Hawaiian-Caucasian politician. There were many people and much activity in his spacious home and we enjoyed the sounds of merry-making and sweet music when he had a luau or a political rally. Across from us on Broad Road there was another large piece of property extending the whole length of the road, with the house facing Buckle Lane. Mr. Dutro, the owner, a gruff and fat Portuguese, would descend upon us growling if he caught us trying to \"steal\" any of his mangoes hanging so temptingly over the fence. I have never seen so many species of mangoes as he had. We were always on the alert for any that would drop onto the road.\n\nNext to the Dutro's on Buckle Lane was a stable occupied by a Mr. Silva, who had a draying business and with whose daughter I had a few casual contacts. I can recall the sight of horses and the smell of hay and manure in his yard. The Ai's lived next to the Silva's until they moved to their beautiful home on Beretania Street in 1915. The Lam Toy's, who had lived across from the Dutro's, sold their home and bought the Ai property in order to better accommodate their large family and visiting relatives.\n\nAs there were very few Christians in the neighbourhood, Father introduced Mother to the Ai's whom he had met at church. Gradually Mother began to meet neighbours who were also converts to the Christian",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 213553,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1995",
        "page_number": 149,
        "title": "RAS-1995",
        "content_text": "118\n\nonly they could communicate with and work for the foreign traders,\n\nA familiar story is emerging.\n\nIn the first of his series of articles in the China Mail of 1958 entitled \"Pidgin Languages\", Robert Wallace Thompson theorized: “In 'simplifying', most speakers tend to use the language one employs when speaking to a small child. Hence the superficial similarity of Pidgin speech and baby talk.\" I do not believe in this theory.\n\nThe point is, the young makee-larn had to learn quickly. Any note-taking was confined by necessity to Chinese characters. The sounds had to fit the writing system available as best they could, and there was simply no time for the extreme complexities of English morphology, much of which was rooted in phonetic differences that Chinese people could in any case not hear, or only reproduce with great difficulty.\n\nAs it was, the foreign traders were almost universally impressed by the calibre and honesty of their Chinese domestic and Factory staff. For a business season which lasted a few months a year, no-one was about to quibble over ropey English. The most that was required was to keep the vocabulary of daily life to a moderate base of general and domestic terms, not to make great demands on the use of complicated grammar, and accept whatever Chinesifications became current. How did consistent Chinese forms of English become current? Both Leland and Hunter have quoted the same answer, and it must be presumed to be broadly correct:\n\n—\n\n\"In the Canton Bookshops near the Factories was sold a small pamphlet called \"Devil's Talk\". On the cover was a drawing of a foreigner in the dress of the middle of the last century - three-cornered hat, coat with wide skirts, breeches and long stockings, shoes with buckles, lace sleeves, and in his hand a cane. I have now one of these pamphlets before me. It commences thus, \"yun\" and under is its \"barbarian\" definition, expressed in another Chinese word whose sound is \"man\". After many examples of this kind come words of two syllables-thus: \"kum-yat\", with their foreign meaning expressed by two other Chinese characters pronounced \"to-teay\" today-and so on to sentences, for which the construction of the language is peculiarly",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g",
        "rank": 0
    }
]