“She was the first person I met in the Faculty of Architecture on Registration Day. She incessantly followed me through the registration process. I reckon that is because I appeared different — I spoke English and she was only comfortable speaking Cantonese.

At the very beginning we used Mandarin as the medium to communicate, though we both struggled with it. Now our conversations are a mixture of English and Cantonese — she speaks Cantonese and I respond in English, or at times, in my stagnant Cantonese. It does get perplexing when you have to use story-like examples or clumsy gestures to illustrate a single word, which somehow results in even more confusion.

But we have still made it so far. Sometimes language appears to be the greatest trouble but it is not everything, you still have something else that’s more important in a relationship to support it.”

  Architecture, HKYOU, humans of hku, Language Barrier, Relationships