Every year around this time my friend Joyce Lau  prepares to go up to the New Territories to spend Chinese New Year in her father's family village with her grandmother, aunties and assorted family. And usually every year she comes back feeling a little bit under the weather. 
   "What's wrong?" I joked with her last year. "Was it the poon choi?" (Last Chinese New Year, if you remember, the Hong Kong government health department went on a "bad poon choi" rampage, blaming badly-prepared Chinese New Year's stew for everything from gastro-distress to hair loss).
 "No," Joyce replied. "It's just that it gets so cold up there at night, and there's no heat, and of course all of us are there camping out on mattresses."
 Thinking practically, I asked her why she didn't bring a down quilt along on her New Year's visits.
 "I can't do that," she explained. "It would make grandma feel bad to think I wasn't warm enough in her house."
 Joyce, as you can see, is one of the most considerate people on the planet.
 Joyce's background is practically a definition of the Hong Kong diaspora: born in Canada, raised in Connecticut, with Hong Kong parents who now live in Melbourne. I met her several years ago, and she's become one of my closest friends. She's always there to explain and guide me in all things related to Cantonese language and Hong Kong customs. If it weren't for Joyce, I would never know about such things as the perpetually circulating box of mooncakes, and how to properly lai see.
 On top of everything else Joyce is a terrific writer, and when I asked her to help me with the blog while I was away, she took time out from preparations for her vacation to contribute a couple of Hong Kong stories. Here's the first:

Joyce Lau: Counting Little Grandma's Money

A colleague and I were at the Delifrance at the rather dinky North Point mall food court when we saw a well-dressed office lady (called "O.L." here, as in "your outfit today is really "O.L.").She walked up and handed us two coupons for free small coffees. "They expire today and I didn't want to waste them," she said. Then she hurried off.

Being a Hong Konger, she couldn't bear to let two perfectly free coffees go to waste. Neither could I, even though the coffees were a pain to carry back to the office, where we have a coffee machine anyway.
My mother would call this particular kind of penny pinching "so poh ji chin," or "counting little grandma's money."  Little old Hong Kong ladies were always known for handing out the smallest lai see at Chinese New Year (in my mom's day, they would just take coins and wrap then in scraps of red paper) and for going far out of their way to save a few dollars.

Hong Kongers' love of coupons is almost legendary. My friend Jen once invited a gweilo boyfriend home to her parents, who cooked a lavish home-cooked Cantonese spread. After everyone had stuffed themselves with duck, shrimp and god knows what else, Jen's father discovered a coupon that would give them a discount on two extra large pizzas. It expired that night, so they called for pizza delivery, to the bewilderment of their guest. This happened more than a decade ago, and they're still talking about it. The coupon that is. The boyfriend is long gone.

The way to say coupon in the Hong Kong vernacular, by the way, is just"coupon." Even a very well educated Cantonese friend of mine had to think long and hard of what the official Chinese term might be. We think it may
be"lai gun," with "lai" being the "lai" in gift, and "gun" meaning something made of paper. (Confusingly, that could be a rather obscure low-tone "gun,"distinct from the rising-tone "gun" that means something shaped like a
roll.) So a coupon would be a "gift on paper."

But the term "coupon" is now like "taxi," pronounced "dik si." Even a Hong Konger who spoke almost no English would say "dik si" instead of the traditional "chu qu che". And nobody would  ever say "lai gun"
when "coupon" would do.