The inevitable finally happened. Last month, during a Chinese New Year dinner at a seafood restaurant in Sham Shui Po, a working-class neighborhood in Kowloon, my wife’s uncle said something that I had been asking myself for years: “You’ve lived in Hong Kong for so many years–and you still don’t speak Cantonese?”

He said that in Cantonese, and I understood it, so I guess that’s something to my credit. But I couldn’t help but feel shame because I have been in Hong Kong for nearly seven years and my Cantonese hasn’t progressed...