RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1988
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q
190

of Mr. Bolton of the Atheneum of Boston, U.S.A.". This catalogue was dictionary in format and it included 2,125 catalogued items, grouped as follows:

General Works 324

Philosophy 278

Religion 54

Sociology 65

Philology 120

Natural Sciences 52

Useful Arts 133

Fine Arts 84

Literature 340

History 675

(13) on Chinese languages)20

The need for a new and larger building became a regular topic of discussion, and the Shanghai Municipal Council became a frequent, if unpredictable, supporter of its causes, including the funding of the renovation of its building in 1909.2

In a guidebook written about this time, the Rev. C. E. Darwent wrote:

The building in which the society is housed is situated in the Museum Road, just behind the British Post Office. There is a good library of books, on Oriental subjects mainly; a good supply of the proceedings of learned societies and learned magazines is kept. There is an exceedingly comfortable lecture hall; upstairs is a museum. The fathers of the settlement did well for it; their successors do nothing.2

By 1910 the library was open seven days a week, and no longer closed for tiffin as it had in earlier times. Donations were increasing, thanks largely to its new honorary librarian, Florence Wheelock Ayscough. A **suggestion book** was put out. A Chinese “assistant librarian” was engaged, first a "Mr. Woo" and later a "Mr. Wong", the latter described as “hard-working and attentive”. These people presumably did the routine checking out of materials, shelving, and record keeping. The library remained essentially an institution serving the foreign community although there was some Chinese membership in later years.

A bequest from Thomas Kingsmill, a long-time society member, enriched the library. Duplicate works were sold and the funds used to
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1998
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794
31

one foot in the grave.' Such expressions could help to bring about death. Nevertheless, in Cantonese slang, a corpse is sometimes described as 'salt fish' (hàm yú), one imagines because of the smell. In the context of not joking about death Mary Rafferty, the then new chief executive at the Matilda Hospital, on the Peak in Hong Kong, seems to have put her foot in it when she told one of the Chinese doctors: 'I'm checking up on you to see if your patients are still alive' (Cheng, 1998). It did not seem to dawn on the good lady that you do not make such remarks in Chinese society.

A retired English, Hong Kong government servant was, as his son described it, showing off to a lady friend how he could swim under water. He suffered a heart attack and died. 'What a wonderful way to go,' was how his middle-aged son, with a grin, described it. When the author related this event to a number of Chinese they were unable to appreciate the 'joke' in quite the same light.

The English sometimes play with sentences and the meaning of words, as may be seen from the joke quoted earlier in this paper, about Lewinsky, Gore and Clinton junk bonds. Similarly the Cantonese, with the homophonous nature of their language, play with similar tones with which two or more characters are pronounced (Smith, 1988:149). They love puns and double entendre, which Westerners do not always appreciate, in which their rich and complex language abounds (Bolton 1997:299). Chinese have a great deal of fun playing with homonyms in their conversations around dining tables. For example two pairs of Chinese characters, both pronounced faat choi but with slightly different tones, mean either 'hair vegetable' (fà cài) (a blue-green algae) or, alternatively, 'become wealthy' (fā cái). There are countless examples. Similarly, a lecturer who taught in the ‘electrical' engineering department of a college varied the tone of the word 'deen' (meaning electrical) so that it sounded as if he taught in the 'crazy' engineering department.

... 

The word for 'fry', in Cantonese, is pronounced chaau. But the same sound is also slang for 'speculate.' People joke about a certain Mr Wong, in Hong Kong, who changed his profession from cook to stockbroker. The pun is that he used to chaau food but now he chaaus shares!
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