Does Hakka has a future?

啊原

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 esulting 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 eal 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 ules 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 eal, 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 eality, 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.

yanxiuhong

A  political and regional unit like Hakka province is necessary for the survival of Hakka culture, I do agree that.

huangchunbin

I agree too!

keen_w

不同文化之间的融合未必符合“达尔文进化论”，文化之间未必能分什么“高低”，即使有恐怕也不是以经济、军事的发展程度来分。无可否认，经济上的优越感某种程度上有助于对某种文化的认同，比如香港经济发展的好、富庶，港产片、粤语歌深入人心，对宏扬岭南文化确实是有作用，但我们应该认识到这其实是先有对自身的认同别人才可能认同你，而不是反过来。客家文化会不会消亡，很多程度上取决于客家人对自身是否认同。客家文化也不乏精华（但是需要去整理，让更多的客家人去认识），客家人也有不少名流、富人，他们的影响也是不容忽视的。

我有小孩的话，我一定会让他/她学会讲客家话，了解家谱、族谱，了解客家风俗、文化。“不能忘本”也是中华民族的传统。

yanxiuhong

If every hakkaer has a strong mind to maintain the culture as you prefer to, then we will be confident enough to say the HAKKAS would have a promising future.