Ahma's Teachings

Ever since I was young, the one who took care of me and my siblings and supervised us 3 was my Ahma (dad's mother or my grandmother). She was the one who knows our dress sizes and keeps buying clothes for us every year up to now, even if she's already in Hong Kong living with our other relatives. But the thing that I am very thankful of my ahma's teaching was learning how to speak and understand Cantonese.

She taught and forced us to learn Cantonese, because our father side relatives are from Hong Kong. Evidently after all those years, I have became more fluent speaking Cantonese than Mandarin (Main Chinese language, taught in Chinese Schools) or Fookien (another Chinese dialect from the southern part of China, it is the most spoken dialect of Chinese here in the Philippines, mostly heard from locals in Binondo).

I know you are surprised to see the "forced us to learn Cantonese" part, my explanation is that ever since me and my siblings where about 5-6 years old, our parents will leave us with our ahma and other relatives in Hong Kong during the 2 months summer vacation. During that time, my ahma was very insistent that we must learn to speak in Cantonese in anyway that we can, up to the point that she even told us that if we don't talk to them in Cantonese we won't eat dinner. That took our attention and we eagerly learned Cantonese by speaking to her regularly and we even started to watch TV shows and cartoons in Cantonese for the sake of learning the language more easier and quickly with taking into consideration of our dinner.

I never regretted it ever since that I listened to my ahma, being a multi-lingual individual had opened my mind to more possibilities like how to analyze and somewhat understand other languages that I'm not familiar with like Korean, Japanese and many more. She had forged a way for us to have more opportunities opened for us to take.

What I really want to share with this post is that you might be forced by your parents some way or the other in doing things. They don't do it for the sake of making you do it because they want to, but they are actually doing it for you because they love you and that they would want you to learn and eventually use it in the future and who knows it might be able to give you an opening to the opportunity that you have been waiting for to fulfill your dreams.

Lastly, I dedicate this blog post also to greet my ahma, Happy Birthday! this coming week is actually her birthday. Wishing you good health and long life. I love you Ahma!