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Where the southern Chinese went, and what happened to the language
Roughly fifty million people of Chinese descent live outside China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, and the overwhelming majority trace to two provinces: Guangdong and Fujian. That is not an accident of temperament. The southern coast had too little arable land, a tradition of seafaring, treaty ports that opened early, and — after the abolition of slavery in the European empires — a demand for indentured labour that recruiters came looking for. The nineteenth-century movement was enormous and often brutal. Labourers went to the tin mines and rubber plantations of Malaya, the sugar of Cuba, the guano islands and railways of Peru, the goldfields of California and Australia, the cane of Hawaii and the Caribbean. Some went under contracts they could not read, on ships with mortality rates that bear comparison to the worst of the period, a trade the Chinese sources call 猪仔 — piglets. Others went as free migrants and traders. Once established, they built the institutions of lesson 89: 会馆 by home county, schools in Chinese, temples, burial societies, and the remittance networks that kept the villages at home alive. The linguistic consequence is the interesting one for this course. Because emigration was regional, the diaspora took southern languages rather than Mandarin: Cantonese to North America and Australia, Hokkien to Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Taiwan, Teochew to Thailand and Cambodia, Hakka to Malaysia, Indonesia and Mauritius, Hainanese to Vietnam. For a century, Chinatown meant Cantonese; 唐人街 in San Francisco or Vancouver operated in Cantonese into living memory. Mandarin arrived later, with post-1980s migration from all over the mainland and with Singapore's and Taiwan's language policies, which is why some older Chinatown institutions changed language in one generation. And then the 断层. The pattern is well documented and consistent: the first generation abroad keeps the language, the second is bilingual and often reluctant, the third understands a little and speaks less, the fourth studies it at university if at all. What survives longer than the language is the food, the festivals, the family names and the 认同 — the sense of belonging that 阿明 says is still there when the speech has gone. A great many 华裔 adults now arrive in Chinese classes as beginners in their grandparents' language, and this course's likeliest reader of this particular lesson may be one of them. One practical note on the vocabulary, because it can give offence by accident. Use 华人 unless you know the person's nationality. 华侨 implies Chinese citizenship and is wrong for somebody whose family left four generations ago. 华裔 is accurate for a person of Chinese descent born abroad and is the term such a person is most likely to use about themselves, often with a country in front of it: 美籍华裔, 马来西亚华裔. And 你是哪里人？ asked of somebody visibly of Chinese descent in London or Lima is a question with some history behind it, so 你们家是哪里人？ — where is your family from — is the kinder form.