Does "Hakka" has a future?

[Lau Chunfat <96981339r@polyu.edu.hk>]

Dear Hakka and non-Hakka friends,

Thank you very much for your concern on this topic. Jonathan's observation
is right. When a culture is dying, you cannot observe this at the
beginning, but when the symptoms are there, it is too late. Hakka is like a
patient suffering from cancer: some cells changed in their DNA structure
and them multiply themselves madly and migrate throughout the body
resulting in painful DEATH. I don't want to see a Hakka culture's as a
group of people speaking all languages but HAKKA, living in all over the
world but Jiaying, and HAKKA becomes the name of a net station instead of a
group of people. Until this moment, on the 25th of May 2000, HAKKA is still
a group of people with blood and flesh, with language and customs living
together in the Eastern part of Guangdong and nearby provinces. They are
real people, not imaginary figures. They are poor and struggle for their
existence. They are learning Cantonese, Mandarin and English to improve
thier standard of life. They cannot find good job opportunities in their
hometowns becuas these are less developed, because these towns and cities
are less important, both politically and economically. The continuation of
the Hakka language and culture is threatened because HAKKA is not an
important language, and speakers of the language cannot get any sense of
pride, but sense of inferiority and poverty. 

In Hong Kong and Taiwan, Hakka people are getting rich and also giving up
Hakka. Superficially, it is a free choice for Hakka people to speak the
"Higher languages", but if we let languages and cultures compete under the
rules of Darwinism, the last winner will be English and Americanism. My
grandparents (father's side) had seven children who gave birth to more than
30 grandchildren, of which about half of them are male and all of them
are/were now in Hong Kong, but I am the only one to speak to children in
Hakka. The great grandchildren of my grandparents are speaking Cantonese or
English (In US or Canada). Worse is, if I try to talk to them in Hakka,
they think I am insulting them. Even my mother-in-law, a 100% Hakka, think
that I am crazy to speak Hakka at home. When it is "normal" for Hakka
people to give up Hakka, my action is objected by my relatives and viewed
as "odd and irrational". They call me stubborn, not following the trend,
and every kind of negative adjectives. On the other hand, many other
non-Hakka quote me as an example for the "livliness" of Hakka, meaning that
Hakka cannot die because "some people are still living". What a good logic!
If 99% of Hakka are assimilating into other cultures, what is our future?
Look, if this essay is written in Hakka (in Chinese characters, for
example), how many of you can understand my message? There are many folks
in the past History, e.g. Tocharians was a group of Indoeuropean speaking
group in NW China about 2000 years ago, and they have left lots of
documents written in their language. But is there anyone in the world who
claim themselves descendents of this culture? No one, why? Because they
have assimilated into other cultures, and maybe some of us have this trait.
I agree with Jonathan's statement: when a culture dies and the people are
practicing another culture which has no connection with the previous one,
it is called DEATH. Don't deceive yourselves that it is a "metamorphasis".
If suddenly a group of people in Hong Kong claim that they are the
descendents of Tocharians, who "show" taht their ancestors are practising
this culutre, but they just speak Cantonese and live like any Hongkongese,
can we say that Tocharian culture is reborn??

Hakka culture can continue to live if it has a language and a piece of
substratum. I admit that language can change, and in 500 years Hakka may be
spoken in a totally different way as todays, but if it has historical
connections with today's tongue and the change is gradual, it is still
Hakka, just like Shakepear's English is different from today's. If we give
up Hakka altogether and make Hakka only a "belief", we have a big problem
to persuade children to believe in "Hakkaism" if they are speaking
Cantonese or English. I have shown that many "beliefs" about Hakka are not
real, not because I want to destroy Hakkaism, but I do want to see
"Hakkaism" to base on misunderstandings or even lies. It cannot last long
when our children or grandchildren find that they are false. For example, I
am against the notion that Hakka are "purer" Chinese than others, not only
because it is insulting the other groups, but it is also unscientific.
Hakka is a social, cultural and linguistic group who distingusih themselves
from Cantonese and other Chinese by living habits and language and also a
different geographical distribution in China. If Hakka want to find a
future, the only way is to stop the mass assimilation into other groups. In
short: No Jiaying province, no future.

To keep Hakka speaking outside of China is a good practice to let the
children remeber their roots, but it can do little to prevent the decline
of Hakka. Not only because only a very small percentage of us can keep
this, but we also have to take the feeling of others into consideration. As
I said before, we cannot do it in a high profile way like the Cantonese in
Canada, who control the mass media and are economically active. I also do
not want to learn from them because it can easily result in ethnical
disputes. The only peaceful way is to do it in our homeland, where it is
legitimate to keep our language and culture from disappearing in situ.

Once again, I do not want to see Hakka culture become a name for an
imaginary, historical and hypothetical group. It should be a living mass of
people on a piece of land, a land on which they lived for hundreds of
years. Strictly sepaking, The eastern part of Hong Kong also belongs to
Hakka speakers, who came 300 years ago and began to cultivate and
cooperated with the Punti speakers (who speak a Cantonese-like dialect) for
the economical devleopment of Hong Kong. But as immigrants from Guangzhou
came 150 years ago, the total cultural ecology has changed. Now I do not
expect that we can claim a piece of conservation area for Hakka in Hong
Kong as Hong Kong has grown to a metropolitan, and Hakka associations in
Hong Kong are synonyms for "elderly clubs". However, to let Hakka culture
continue to fluorish in eastern Guangdong is no overdemand.

Hakka may have a future, if we can come to a conclusion that Hakka as a
culture is now very sick, and every minute is critical for its rescue. If
we are still thinking Hakka is still healthy and sound, that the loss of
Hakka speaker is no big deal, that "history" is more important than the
reality, that assimilation of Hakka into other groups is a "normal
tendency", that speaking Hakka is not important to the preservation of our
culture, that a Jiaying province is not our goal, that we only talk on how
Hakka lived but not how they will live ... then I would say

Hakka has no future.


Yours sincerely,

Liu Zinfad / Lau Chunfat