Author: Lea Tsang
Date: 05-02-12 11:44
Yes, I am very much interested in Hakka culture as a whole. I have a few BBC hakka friends in the UK. In fact there were a bunch of us girls in the same year at Guildford College of Law class 1993/1994. I am still friends with 2 of them. I was speaking with one of them the other day about how our dialect is often looked down on by Cantonese and Mandarin speakers.
What I love the most is meeting Hakka people from other countries. So far I have spoken with hakkas from Malaysia, India, Jamaica, Thailand, Mauritius although the Mauritians of my generation no longer speak hakka. I believe that they have lost the dialect over the 4 or 5 generations they have settled there.
I like meeting not only hakkas but Chinese in general. I once went by myself to visit a tiny village called Ban Nam near to Huay Xai in northern Laos populated by a Chinese people. They were very poor and the local Lao people looked down on them but the village chief whom I spoke with was very proud to be Chinese. He spoke to me in his limited Chinese dialect and I try to pick up what he said from my limited Mandarin. I gathered that they had settled there for 5 generations. It's amazing where Chinese people will settle in the World. My dad always says where there is fire there will always be Chinese people.
Lea Tsang
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