See, there were all these things I wanted to share with you — like the fact that my Holga arrived yesterday, and I went and got some film for it today and am taking it to New York to play with tomorrow. It’s about the size and shape of a mass market paperback, and so light you could probably stick it in an envelope and send it off by local post for 35 cents with room for a card.

Or the fact that the beautiful Portuguese church on the corner is having their Santo Cristo feast this weekend and they have not only lit up the street with orange lights, they have also apparently rented a portable Ferris wheel and teacup ride to put in their parking lot for the weekend. They are officially the coolest church ever.

Or even that one of my co-workers, a very lovely person with impeccable posture and an unexpected sense of humor, has organized a company-wide Mandarin conversation group (she learned several years ago while teaching for the Peace Corps). We had our first meeting today at lunch — four strangers with extremely limited vocabularies laughing and lurching our way through some necessarily amicable chatter. (I did learn how to say “Freud” in Chinese. It has four syllables and it kind of made my day.)

So many stories. But then, Ross and I went to see Kung Fu Hustle tonight, and it all fell away. Now, all I want to tell you is the sad, revealing fact that at the moment, this movie — not dim sum, not the Great Wall, not thousands of years of history, culture, and language — is what is making me proud to be half Cantonese.

I don’t really know how to describe this film. Wait. Yes, I do. I am going to list all of the things it reminded me of, in no particular order.

• Old westerns. The kind with the twangy music and showdowns. And dust and ruffles. I am surprised that there were no saloon doors, frankly. I suppose the fact that it was set in a shantytown in 1940s Shanghai sort of precluded that.
• Classic kungfu movies, obviously. With all the different schools of fighting that have ridiculous names and the scenes where people peer out of windows at a scuffle and draw in their breaths: “Ooooh. The Exploding Firefly Style from Wei Shan city. He’s in trouble now.”
• Somehow, crazily, The Shining. There’s this one scene, with the bloody flood, and… trust me.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and this is because it also has extremely strong influences from
• Warner Brothers cartoons. The violence is very Tom and Jerry, there was one scene that was totally a Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote tribute, and several characters displayed the temperament of the Tazmanian Devil. I think this is completely brilliant. I loved how cross-cultural the film was. It could never exist in this form without American cartoons, and it did a wonderful, wonderful job of riffing on:
• The Matrix. This is particularly cool because The Matrix steals all of its neato slowed-down action shots, circling cameras, and flying fights from Hongkong movies in the first place. And Kung Fu Hustle is like, “Uh huh. We know what you’re doing. And we can still do it better than you. Plus, we’re funnier.” It’s all very satisfying.

And now, along with my Mandarin conversation group, the Hebrew classes I’m thinking about taking this summer to revive my skills, and the desire to someday study Punjabi so I can rap with my dad, I also need to find time before I die to learn Cantonese.

(And then, I need to get a spiffy suit and slick back my hair, and join a Chinese mafia.)

Sorry, mum. Apparently growing up around it was not enough of an impetus. I needed Stephen Chow to convince me the language half my family speaks is really, really cool. Meanwhile, questions for you:

1) Why do they mix up Mandarin and Cantonese all the time, even in the same conversation? I get that it’s supposed to tell you where people are from (sort of), but does it make sense to you?
2) What is mo lei tau?
3) Exactly how many tones does Cantonese actually have? (I’m going to bet six thousand.)