Mrs. Lau taught me words for ordinary things.
Water.
Tea.
Bread.
Rice.
Thank you.
Excuse me.
Wait.
Be careful.
Then she began teaching me sentences.
She made me repeat them until I could hear the tones properly.
If I got something wrong, she corrected me.
Not cruelly.
But with the seriousness of someone who believed language deserved care.
"Listen first," she would say.
"Then speak."
I learned that Cantonese wasn't simply Mandarin with a different accent.
It was a language with its own pronunciation, expressions, and rich everyday speech.
Mrs. Lau taught me through conversations rather than textbooks.
We talked about food.
Weather.
School.
My brother.
The bakery.
And the stories she remembered from Hong Kong.
She told me about crowded streets.
Ferries crossing Victoria Harbour.
Family meals.
The importance of Lunar New Year.
And the first winter she spent in California, when she was astonished that people complained about rain while enjoying weather that would have felt mild elsewhere.
Sometimes she laughed at my questions.
Sometimes she answered with more questions.
And sometimes, when she missed her late husband, she became quiet in a way I understood.
We had both lost someone we loved.
Perhaps that was why we became so close.
By ten, I could speak enough Cantonese to hold simple conversations with her customers.
By thirteen, I could understand stories she told without translation.
By sixteen, I was studying written Chinese and learning to distinguish between the formal language used in documents and the Cantonese we spoke in the bakery.
Mrs. Lau was delighted.
But she never let me become arrogant.
One afternoon, I translated a customer's question badly and nearly gave him the wrong order.
Mrs. Lau corrected me.
I complained.
"But I understood most of it."
She shook her head.
"Most isn't always enough."
I rolled my eyes.
She pointed toward the customer.
"If someone says no peanuts and you hear most of the sentence, what happens?"
I stared.
She raised one eyebrow.
Then said quietly, "A little missing meaning can become a big problem."
I remembered those words years later when I first saw a forty-million-dollar difference hidden in a bilingual contract schedule.
But at sixteen, I was mostly embarrassed that I'd made a mistake in front of someone.
Mrs. Lau smiled.
Then handed me another pineapple bun.
"Eat. Then try again."
Language became the thing that made me feel capable when everything else seemed uncertain.
I loved mathematics too.
Numbers behaved differently from people.
They didn't care where you lived.
They didn't care what your parents earned.
They didn't care whether somebody thought you belonged in a room.
If a calculation was wrong, it was wrong.