Frozen KAngaroo Meat, Speaking MAndarin In Perth

Along many of Western Australian roads - signs for kangaroos.

A sure sign that my Chinese must be getting better became apparent the other day. A planned trip out to the country failed when our Tom Tom told us “…you have arrived at your destination…”. Lezil and I peered out of the car to see nothing but forest all around us with no Koala reserve in sight.

We drove on for another 15 minutes in the hope of finding an entrance but we came up empty. There was the odd road sign warning us to keep a look out for kangaroos, but that was it. It was getting late in the afternoon and technically there was only an hour left until the reserve closed, so we decided to postpone the visit for another day. (And look at a good old-fashioned map for the exact coordinates!) We headed back into Perth’s suburbs and made a pit-stop at a shopping complex. We decided to pick up some eats at Coles (a type of Australian Tesco). It was totally weird seeing shelf after shelf of Western food.

Back in Shanghai, not even 1% of what was sold there we could get our hands on and even then, it would be relegated to half an aisle of so-called ‘imported goods’. Of course, we came across some local produce including kangaroo meat. Now, that’s not so uncommon being in Australia and all. But what we saw was kangaroo meat for pets, in the frozen food section, in between the frozen pizzas and frozen dim sum. How pet food got grouped there, and of the kangaroo meat variety – beats me.

For some reason, they had run out on cucumbers. We paid for the rest of our items and near the mini shopping precinct exit was a small grocers.

In a supermarket's frozen food section, kangaroo meat for pets.

In the vegetable and fruit section there was a variety of greens on offer. In big green plastic trays were three kinds of cucumbers on offer. I wasn’t sure which one to get. Looking around for a sales clerk, I called over the man behind the cash till. Asking him to differentiate between the three types, he struggled to string a sentence together.

Meeting a very excitable Chinese-speaking, Mr Ong!

I guessed by his Asian appearance and his accented Chinglish, that he must have been Chinese. I flipped into Mandarin mode. “Zhe shi yi yang de ma?” (Is this the same?) He stood back and starting flapping his hands like he had just won the state lottery. A flood of Mandarin came my way and I had to ask him to slow down. (I’m not that good yet!) He asked how I learnt to speak Mandarin and I told him that both Lezil and I are currently living in Shanghai. It was a fast-moving conversation with him firing all sorts of questions at me. My vocabulary is limited but I managed to get across what my profession is, why we were in Australia, how long the flight is between Shanghai and Perth and, strangely enough, what an average teacher’s salary in Shanghai is.

The inevitable picture-taking took place and we exchanged business cards (using two hands of course) with him giving me his personal mobile number and giving me a sneak peek of a recent photo of his granddaughter. I thought we’d be happy to have a break from all things Chinese. But in reality, it was comforting to come into contact with something that was overly familiar to us. This guy could have been anyone. Overlooking the fact that my Mandarin was very low-level, he enthusiastically engaged with us like we had been family who had just flown in from the motherland to celebrate Chinese New Year in Perth. Who would have thought, that I would be using Mandarin in Australia to get by a language barrier situation?