Fog

It's extraordinary how kids learn themselves the rightness or wrongness of language.

No dictionary or grammar textbook there, and no blind rote learning. Yet children catch the essence of how languages should work. Obviously they make up new words like mouses, but not mice.

No sentence is too trivial or too boring if we spend time to expand the words with kids. I took a day off yesterday to join my daughter's school outing to Kadoorie Farm. The weather was so-so. "Look. Daddy, the mountain is moldy," Jasmine concluded.

I followed her finger and looked out of the car window. I couldn't see the top of the mountain. I knew what she meant. "Yes. Doesn't it look like the scraps of our bug box where the mealworm and beetle live? The scraps turn moldy. You might call the weather foggy, though."

To those of us who speak Chinese, it is no less an example of homophone. Moldy and foggy sounds alike in Chinese. Both words fall under the umbrella of "rain" in Chinese characters, too. Common sense would have told me to give a lecture on the Chinese characters. But common sense has no place in children's curiosity and never has.

My daughter dropped the word for the foggy weather, and then told me, "In fact, dad, the more I look at the mountain, the more it looks like someone behind the bridal veil."

Cell phone

It's late in the afternoon. On my way home, I was reading a book about wordplay on a minibus. But I couldn't concentrate.

I wasn't tired. And yet it took me quite some time to finish a page. I felt an explosion inside my head, as if my brain lost the way underneath a mushroom cloud from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Ahhhh, there was too much noise around. That, it hardly needs saying, was the noise of passenger's use of cell phone.

Now that smoking is banned on most public areas, verbal pollution by cell phones has dominated the public nuisance. This new brand of pollution, as Faith Popcorn and Adam Hanft remind us, is secondhand speech, the verbal equivalent of secondhand smoke - "not as dangerous but more annoying, and definitely hazardous to your peace of mind."

Alas, do we have a word to describe those people who talk loudly on the cell phones and broadcast their one-sided conversations?

Cellfish.

Mistake

It's late morning at the guesthouse in Chiang Mai, where we were having breakfast. That's when I'd stopped in the middle of the mealtime and gone for a few photographs.

"Daddy, you'd be away without telling us." My daughter looked at me like a teacher.

"I - I didn't know," I stuttered.

"You should have told us, and we didn't realize you'd been away so long."

"I didn't know it matter," I said, contrite an instant later at my defensive tone. "Daddy sometimes makes mistake."

I reckoned, pretty soon, that it's high time to teach my daughter that adults are entitled to be wrong and make mistakes. Why not? Everyone should have the license to make mistakes. During the recent Thailand trip, my daughter has been taking it oh-so-seriously whenever her drawing got outside the border (or when her cutting got awry). I can't teach her to make every drawing perfect, but I know I can tell her making mistakes is in many ways a birthright.

Chiang Mai

One of the liveliest things about travel is how unpredictably each day unfolds itself. And I suppose my daughter has somehow learnt the random happenstance of every overseas trip.

This time, we went to Thailand and stayed in a large, quiet house in Chiang Mai, a perfect respite from the noise and hustle of Bangkok. I slept in the luxury of air-conditioned room, and woke up to the singsong of birds. As a guesthouse, it's an alluring experience for us: there's a leafy courtyard where we can pick pebbles and play, a bar where we can open the fridge and help ourselves with the apple juice, a canteen we don't have to order meals (the owner chose for us).

The trip to this guesthouse would not be more complete without visiting its affiliated children's aid project. That's a big family to make education possible for children from the mountain villages of Northern Thailand and neighbouring Burma. Turns out, I found, that's the first time in their lives the children have experienced love and stability. After finishing the high school, many of them came to the guesthouse and completed the internship of tourism and home economics.

We weren't planning to have volunteer work at the children's shelter foundation. We were there playing with the kids, hearing from them how the farm was run, seeing how they made a swing like Tarzan. As for Jasmine, she found her friend by herself - the youngest among the children. Even my daughter could not speak Thai (and the other girl knows little English), the two of them were playing the slide together, sharing every morsel of snacks, chasing the cats and talking in meows.

At that, I couldn't help but smile.