Speaking in English in Chinese Club (#277, Topic L)

Our retirement community has a Chinese Club, with 100+ members. Though most members came from China and speak Chinese as the first language, meetings in the club were nevertheless conducted in English. Why? One, some members have non-Chinese-speaking spouses. Two, some members can only speak dialects such as Cantonese, but not 普通話 pu tong hua (common [Chinese] language = mandarin, best spoken by residents of Beijing as 京片子, analogous to the Oxfordian accent in Britain or the midwestern accent in US). Still, it makes me uncomfortable. Indeed, I feel ashamed that a person of Chinese ancestry cannot speak the common language. A couple of days ago, our Chinese Club talked about starting a computer club, teaching fellow residents how to use computers to input Chinese characters and send/receive e-mail in Chinese. Shouldn't such a club use Chinese for discussion purposes? Apparently no. My suggestion that Chinese be the standard was simply ignored. Reason: some computer terms cannot be easily rendered into Chinese. An example is menu (choices or options in a computer) which, somehow has been translated into Chinese as 寀單 = offerings in a restaurant. Fair enough. Still, why give up so easily? I said to the organizer of this compute club that, back in 1983, I lectured at Qinghua University for five weeks, on Computer Applications in Business -- and I spoke only 普通話. I translated technical terms into Chinese to the best of my ability. (They also translated a book of mine on the subject into Chinese as the textbook, so I knew how some words are to be translated.) Indeed, later on, I repeated the same course at the Shanghai Institute (now University) of Finance and Economics. Again, I spoke only 普通話. One student was brave enough to stand up and ask: 能不能請您用上海話講演? ("Will you please use Shanghai dialect to lecture?") (All students were university professors or lecturers, so they were less afraid to speak up.) I declined. I said: "My Shanghai dialect is better than my普通話, since I had my elementary-school, middle-school, and university education here. However, Shanghai is a metropolis with residents from all over the country; using 普通話 is probably better." So, they endured my Shanghai-accented 普通話 for the entire course.