Cantonese Is Dead
I've just landed in Hong Kong only to discover that Cantonese is dead. Sei jo la! It must be true. The New York Times says so. But wait. Their reporter also calls Cantonese a "dialect". (And determines that Mandarin is a "language"). And he goes on to declare that Mandarin is the "lingua franca" of East Broadway, the Fujianese stronghold of New York's Chinatown.
Hmm. I was down on East Broadway just last Sunday with Long Hair, during his whirlwind 36 hour visit to New York City (his first trip to America!). We were there because one of his Hong Kong- American supporters owns an herbal shop there, and he wanted to give Long Hair some bags of fresh Wisconsin ginseng to take back home to Wong Yuk Man as a present, a sau seun.
The shop owner, of course, spoke to us in straight-off-the-Cathay-Pacific-777 Hong Kong Cantonese. As did at least half the people we passed on the way to his shop. As for the rest of the bustling pedestrians, shopowners and restaurateurs on East Broadway, I can confidently report that they were NOT speaking what the New York Times reporter has determined to be the new Chinatown "lingua franca", Mandarin.
They were, of course, speaking Fujianese.
The, ahem, language of Fujian province.
Anybody who has studied Chinese linguistics is familiar with the complex and fascinating language map of China, but for some reason Americans, even Times reporters, manage to not get it. And what's really even more frustrating is that a lot of Chinese themselves (like the people interviewed in the NYT article) are happy to go along with the Westerners' misguided notion that Mandarin Chinese is the original Chinese native language from which all other so-called lesser Chinese "dialects" spun off.
But as we readers of Learning Cantonese know, linguistically, China is almost as vast and varied as Europe or India. The language of the Beijing region and of Canton are as different as Italian and Portuguese. In Hunan they speak a language with different roots and structure from the people in Wanzhou. Wanzhou language is vastly dissimilar from the language spoken in Sichuan.
Written Chinese was developed, thousands of years ago, with a purpose: to be the first pan-Chinese lingua franca--a kind of Chinese esperanto. The characteristics of written Chinese that we westerners find so difficult and cumbersome--the vast number of characters to memorize, the lack of a phonetic alphabet--are a direct function of the original project. Written Chinese had to be ideographic, for if it had been phonetic and pronouciation-based, it would have been useful only to one Chinese language group.
Mandarin--or as it is called here in Hong Kong, putonghua, "common language"--was created (yes, created!) for the same reason as written Chinese. The Chinese nationalist movement knew that in order to unite the far flung regions of China, they needed to establish a national language. The old story goes that Sun Yat Sen (a Cantonese speaker) got together with the top Nationalist honchos to vote on what the national language would be. And, but for one vote, all the bureaucrats in Beijing would be speaking in Gwong dung wah today.
Instead, they decided to base the national language of China on the Chinese spoken in the region around Beijing.
Still, despite more than 50 years of official support, education, and with all the levers of the central Chinese government pushing the primacy of Gwok Yu (national language), Mandarin is the first language of a whopping 40% of all Chinese. (It's spoken by just 70% of Chinese, which is still an astonishing figure, given the primacy of putonghua).
Anyway, the "Cantonese is Dead" meme gets my dander up for all kinds of reasons. For one, it perpetuates the falsehood that Mandarin is the original Chinese language from which all others are somehow lesser, dialect derivatives. As a student of Cantonese, I resent this perfunctory dismissal of a rich language that is both older and more complex than Mandarin.
But more than that, I get annoyed because the "Rise of Mandarin" meme also feeds the central Chinese government's distorted propaganda about Chinese ethnicity and identity. In the eyes of Beijing, all Chinese are "Han people"--whatever "Han" is (to my ears, the term carries the creepiness of "White" or "Aryan"). In their universe, all Chinese are "Han" who should be speaking "gwok yu" (national language). And, every right thinking "Han" person from Taipei to Bangkok, from Sheung Wan to Mott Street must fall in line and get with the Motherland program: bowing to the inevitabilty of a new Chinese empire, ruled from Beijing.
I'm not against mutual intelligibility. I think it is great that Mandarin exists so that Fujianese can speak and exchange ideas freely and easily with Sichauanese and Chiu Chow. But language is not just about communication, it is about politics. And if you accept the "Cantonese is Dead", "Shanghainese is Dead" and "Fujienese is dead" dialect meme, then you are also buying into the idea that there is just one China, and only one kind of Chinese. And that this "Chinese-ness" is defined (and controlled) by the central government of the People's Republic of China.
I like diversity. So do Chinese. Without the distinctive, vibrant, regional cultures of Sichuan, Canton, Fujian, Hunan, and the tribal regions of the West, China would be a far less interesting and compelling place. Chinese-ness has evolved in splendid ways thanks to the sophistication, history and complexity of Hong Kong and the overseas Chinese communities from New York to Bangkok to Singapore and Melbourne.
And Chinese people do understand this. That's why, in cities from Guangzhou to Shanghai, to Shantou, the kids speak two (and often three) languages--the one they speak at home, and the one they learn in school. That's why the babble of business on East Broadway is in Fujianese, and the babble of business in Penang's Chinatown is a polyglot of Fujianese (Hokkien), Cantonese and Mandarin. (This polyglot nation notion is very alien to Americans, which is probably why the New York Times article works on the assumption that one, and only one Chinese language must dominate Chinatown).
I'm also creeped out by artificial nation building projects, with their whiffs of racial supremacy and manifest destiny, whether they originate in Washington DC or Beijing. There's much more spiritual strength, in the long run, in a nation that encourages people to be their polyglot, quirky, diverse and fascinating selves, rather than tries to mold them into some idealized mono-lingual "New Man."
Language is a dangerous thing. It springs from the people, not from the bureaucrats. You can try to regulate it, squash it, punish people for speaking it. Yet it persists, survives, subverts. We speak, and what we speak is who we are. That's not going to die anytime soon.
I love your blog....as a temporary resident of Hong Kong and a slow learner of its freakishly hard "dialect" with a little knowledge of history my dander is also up about this kind of misrepresentation....and its wicked of you to point out the aryan-ness of the idea of Han people...in a place as diverse as China there's no need for this kind of lowest common denominator nonsense.
Look forward to your next post....a little sooner would be good {~_-}
mick
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Welcome back to Hong Kong, Daisann -- and am so glad you're blogging again! :)
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I hate to point this out because I know it's horribly cliched, but we all know these are the reasons why the government in the book _1984_ was most concerned about recreating language. It's sad when any country tries to do it.
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Love your blog. Growing up ABC in California to Cantonese parents, I remember hearing many dialects spoken around friends and family. Cantonese, Toisan, and the rare Mandarin were the sounds of my youth. The influx of Taiwanese brought the Mandarin and Hokkien/Fujian/Fukian quotient up, but it was mainly Cantonese until the late 90s. It's refreshing to see someone with a take similar to mines, but brought about in such an entertaining manner.
My Cantonese is crappy, but I still try to use it when given the opportunity. Having the watch salesman in HK expound the virtues of buying a Rolex in Cantonese really gave me a headache trying to follow him, but excited me at the same time with the passion of the delivery.
More "Bok Gwai"s need to stop trying to see things in just black and white.
Keep up the good work and fight the good fight.
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This weekend, I am in Oakland Chinatown for a family gathering of 4 generations of my paternal Tseng/Tsang/Dong family in San Francisco (the multi-spelling stems from multiple American immigration registrations of the Cantonese-ToiShan pronunciation versions of our family name). Yesterday, in a Chinese video store, I bought a mainland China (opposed to Hong Kong) produced DVD of "White Snake Legend", the famous mythological tale of gorgeous female sepentine entrappers of unwary males. The Mandarin version was $9 bucks for 30 episodes (30 cents / episode), but I shelled out $30 bucks for the Cantonese version with English subtitles! You do the math, that's pirate mainland DVD empire domination! To add salt to the wound, they gave me a FREEBIE DVD of Mainland Chinese Military Parades from the last 60 years!!!! WOW, can't wait!!!!
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Muna, you've hit upon something. The "death of Cantonese" is nothing but an insidious Mainland marketing ploy! If Cantonese is "dead", then it becomes a specialty or, let's say, a "boutique" language. Therefore, of course the price for anything in Cantonese must be several times the price of something in the "common" language of Chinese.....
I'm sure you can work your DVD of Chinese military parades into your next dance performance, dear.
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Glad to see back, dear Daisann.
May I add that the Fujianese now popular (since around early 1990's) popular in East Broadway of Chinatown, New York is the northern branch of Fujianese, based on the native tongue of residents of Fuzhou (capital city of Fujian Province). The southern branch of Fujianese is Hokkien (or South Fukienese, or Taiwanese, or Minnan) is based on the native tongue of residents of Xiamen (formerly, Amoy) in south Fujian Province, which is spoken in even larger areas than its northern counterpart. It is widely spoken -- outside mainland China -- in Taiwan, Southeast Asia (say, Singapore), and parts of US (say, Flushing area of New York City), and other outside-China places.
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Thanks for the excellent rundown on the differences between Fujianese language and Hokkien! I myself was not clear on the distinction (actually, I thought that "Hokkien" was just the southeast Asian word for "Fukkien".)
Hokkien language, of course, is the widest spoken Chinese language of Malaysia (shout out to YTSL!
But the funny thing is that in Penang (that's the most Chinese-dominant city in Malaysia), there are several sizeable groups of Chinese immigrants who came from different parts of southern China in the 1800s and 1900s: Fujian, Canton and Chiu Chow. While Hokkien language is the most widely spoken in Penang, Cantonese and Chiu Chow (or Teochow in a different spelling) are also very much alive. And Cantonese speakers have learned some Hokkienese and vice versa.
What I'm getting at is that for Chinese, learning a bit of the other group's Chinese language is no big deal. There doesn't have to be a "number one" Chinese language in a Chinatown. You have different languages for different purposes. That idea of competing languages is purely a construct of the New York Times reporters and editors.
I understand that impulse, being a journo myself. You "sell" your story to an editor by packaging it with a hook. But often, the hook forces you into an exaggeration, or even a distortion of reality. Nuance is not so easy to package.
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dm wrote:
Thanks for the excellent rundown on the differences between Fujianese language and Hokkien! I myself was not clear on the distinction (actually, I thought that "Hokkien" was just the southeast Asian word for "Fukkien".)
"Hokkien" is the Hokkien word for "Fujian" (a province), and "Fukkien" is the earlier romanization (of Mandarin) for the same province. Hokkien is spoken by most ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia. In Malaysia, though, it is dominant in Penang, but not in Johor Bahru (where Cantonese is dominant).
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Unfortunately, many Hong Kong yan have bought into the Mandarin-is-the-true-language meme. I remember assiduously practicing my Cantonese from tapes and books before moving to HK in 97. The project I was working on involved some co-workers from HK coming over here (California) to help prestage things before we all left for Hong Kong. So I persistently badgered the HK contingent to let me practice my Guang Dung Hua. One fellow told me: "Oh, you shouldn't be learning Cantonese. You should learn Mandarin. That's the language of China." My response was: "Do you speak Mandarin?" He looked a bit embarrassed and replied that he didn't. After that he took a more active roll in helping me learn Cantonese. I think it's a wonderful language. Too bad I no longer live in HK. I've lost most of my Cantonese from lack of practice.
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Hi with what books and tapes did you practise your cantonese? I'm German and I want to learn cantonese so bad because of my girlfriend.
Thanks for any advice you have for me!
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I don't know where this author went to in Chinatown, but for someone who has spent a lot of time in Manhattan, and speaks all three dialecs/languages mentioned in your post in varying fluency, I can safely say that Cantonese is still very much the lingua franca of East Broadway. Fujianese? My Hokkien was close to useless in Chinatown! Everyone speaks Cantonese!
I always try my luck in putonghua first when in Chinatown, and oftentimes, many shopkeepers hardly understand me. I switch to Cantonese, and I get exactly what I want!
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Hi--thanks for posting!
You're right, Cantonese is still the "default" language for most New York Chinatown interactions. Even the mainland born waitstaff of restaurants needs to speak Cantonese.
Fujianese is, however, widely spoken on East Broadway, the heart of the Fujianese immigrant community. (Your Hokkien is not the same language as the Fujianese immigrants are speaking...see the great explanatory post by Allan, in the comment thread above.)
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Great article, Daisann. I couldn't agree more. Could you send this to the New York Times?
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Thanks Pete. It's too late for me to send it as a letter to the editor. But here it is on the Internet, and as we know the Internet is forever!
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Great article with interesting info. I personally feel that we Chinese needs a common language in order to unite ourselves. Mandarin is doing well and now also being accepted by foreigners and I feel we should also accept it after the big effort by the first Emperor to unite China with so much sacrifices. When I vistted China, I was so impressed by the unity and able to correspond with them any where I go. However, I also agree that we must preserve all the old dialects and use it at home at least. In Malaysia, most areas speak the Hokkien (Fujian) dialects especially in Northern Malaysia (particularly Kedah, Penang,certain areas of Perak such as Taiping), Malacca, certain areas of Seremban, Johore and Eastern Malaysia. It is the most popular Chinese dialect in Malaysia except for some past mining towns such as Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur where Cantonese are spoken. Malaysian Chinese are also united by the Mandarin language and all politicans use it. Cantonese was spread in Malaysia by Hong Kong's movie industry. There are also many variations in the Fujian dialects. The famous Penang Hokkien dialect is indeed very unique and spoken widely in the North.
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You might not post very often but when you do, it's always a gem. As someone who does fear that his language is indeed dying out, it's nice to hear a rebuttal to the overwhelming talk (pun intended?) of the dominance of Mandarin.
I read someone else's blog post many years ago where they stated that while may Chinese speak Mandarin, they speak it because they have to. People speak their own dialect (I agree that the concept is a Western creation. I'm studying Danish now and Norwegian is extremely similar, yet no one would dare call Norwegian a dialect of Danish) because they want to, because they love their language.
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"People speak their own language because they want to, because they love the language"
I couldn't say it any better!
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Long Hair was here? I find it interesting that nobody at the New York Times wrote about him being here. Not even City Room.
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