Exactly! Once, back in 2011 when I’d just moved from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, I was exploring the back-streets of KL Chinatown. Walking down a dingy old alley, I saw a small beef noodle shop, with steam rising from its pots right out of the door - like a scene from old HK or Guangzhou. There was a wizened old man in a white undershirt preparing the noodles. For a moment, I was contemplating what to say to him in my shaky Cantonese - I know that KL’s older Chinese who’re mainly Cantonese pooh-poohed speaking in Mandarin (which they felt was too formal, and some of them don’t even speak it), and their knowledge of Hokkien or Teochew (Singapore’s most common dialects) are almost non-existent.
Just then, the old man looked up at me - and this vision of an old Cantonese man in a traditional Chinese back alley setting, looking 100% a Cantonese hawker from some isolated Chinese village opened his mouth and English words flowed smoothly out: “You want to try my beef noodles? Have a seat inside”. I smiled inwardly, trying hard to suppress a giggle and was thinking at the time, “Hey, I’m in KL, not China. And that old Chinaman’s spoken English sounded better than mine!”. 
