What are the Cantonese words for "How far does honorable Xi wish me to bend over, and does he wish it during a 'presser'?" I don't know why he would.
#5 | Posted by RightisTrite at 2025-06-08 04:57 PM
I suspect that Xi doesn't speak Cantonese, or at least he won't admit that he does, since the official language of China is Mandarin. Cantonese is still spoken in the Southern parts of China, but the Communist Party has been trying to discourage its use as much as possible without causing a cultural war with those parts of China where it's still spoken by the average person.
Several years ago, before I retired, I gave a presentation at an engineering conference in Zhuhai, China which is in the Guangdong Province, which was once called Canton. Now I've been all over the world and have often had to work with a translator when giving a presentation. However, this was the first time that I had TWO translators, one who translated what I was saying into Mandarin and one into Cantonese. Obviously, this wasn't a simultaneous translation. I had to break my presentation into 15-30 second segments and then wait for the Mandarin translation and then the Cantonese translation before I could continue. That was one of the hardest presentations that I've ever given. In other places like Russia, Ukraine, Japan or Mexico, we could get by with a simultaneous translation, which while I still had to speak slowly, at least I didn't have to stop and start all the time. Now when I was presenting in places like Germany, India, Singapore, Netherlands or any of the Scandinavian countries, English was just fine. Even in places like Brazil and Indonesia, I had no real problems with English, just that I had to be more careful about using idioms and slang.
OCU
This coming Saturday, June 14th, almost simultaneous with Trump's Army/Birthday parade in Washington DC, the Diocese of Chicago is going to be holding a celebration recognizing the election of Pope Leo the 14th. Now the Pope won't be there in person, but he'll speak over a live TV feed from Rome to the crowds at Rate Field, where his favorite team, the White Sox play. The event will be broadcast locally and on the internet. Tickets to attend the event live are being sold for $5 each (10,000 tickets were sold within 15 minutes of them going on sale).
It will be interesting to compare the number of empty seats a Rate Field in Chicago versus what I have to assume will be bleachers set-up along the parade route for the Washington DC event.
OCU