Hakkas: origin and childhood speech
Deng Xiaoping -- former paramount leader of China -- was a Sichuanese Hakka. Lee Teng Hui, past president of Taiwan, and Lee Kuan Yew, founder of the modern Singapore state and its first prime minister, were Hakkas, too.
Who are these Hakkas? By definition, Hak-ka means "guest people", the wandering tribe in China, without a true home. Since the days of the Sung Dynasty a thousand years back, they have migrated to almost every province in China (about 910,000 according to a 2001 report), and have formed a substantial minority in Taiwan, Hong Kong and South-east Asia.
My father was one such migrant. He grew up in the Hakka heartland of Meisian county in southern Guangdong province and left for South-east Asia just before the Japanese invasion in the early 1930s.
According to historian Jonathan Spence, in his book, God's Chinese Son (published 1996), the Hakkas traced their origins in the central plains to the south of the Yellow River near Kaifeng. Their speech is strange to most other Chinese, but is seen by themselves as a pure form of the ancient Chinese tongue. In fact, Chinese linguistic scholars have used Hakka words and diction to figure out how ancient Chinese spoke -- which was certainly not Mandarin, the current national language.
By the 19th century, most Hakkas were either farmers or miners. An important difference between Hakkas and their neighbours was that Hakka women did not bind their feet to make them small and "attractive". Hakka women walked freely and worked in the fields with their men. According to several of my uncles who came from China in the early 1900s, the admirable quality of the women was their martial aptitude -- while the men ploughed the land, the women would stand guard with rifles and spears to discourage predatory neighbours, such as the Cantonese, from raiding their farms.
Taiping Revolution
In the mid-19th century, Hakka peasants under their leader Hong Xiuquan started the Taiping ("Grand Peace") Revolution to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. In the Taiping army, women commando units were common and women regularly led heroic assaults that sometimes turned impending defeats into victory.
Hong was the Hakka figure with the greatest impact on modern history. The man who adopted Christianity after reading some missionary tracts, proclaimed himself the younger brother of Jesus, and "God's Chinese Son". He had a millennial vision,
My hand grasps the killing powerin Heaven and on earth;To behead the evil ones, spare the justand ease the people's sorrow.Although the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and its New Jerusalem in Nanking city were eventually crushed by Manchu troops with the aid of Western firepower, its ideals continued to inspired 20th century revolutionaries such as the early Kuomintang leaders led by Dr Sun Yat Sen and the Communists led by Mao Zedong.
Mao, who had studied closely the Taiping's military doctrines and techniques, their order of battle, and their mass experiments in establishing a new and disciplined cultural and spiritual order, was able, in the course of two decades (1930s-1949), to overcome his foes and successfully establish the People's Republic. [A reader sent an e-mail saying both Mao and Dr Sun were also Hakka but I' haven't checked yet.]
Today, the memory of the Revolution of Great Peace continued to be commemorated by the Beijing government.
I grew up in an extended Hakka family in Singapore's Chinatown, surrounded by more than a dozen closely-related families of uncles, aunts and cousins. In childhood I spoke and communicate only in Moy-yen Hakka (the Hakka language itself comes in several dialects), but as I grew up and went to English language schools, I used Hakka less and less frequently, and today, I can hardly sustain a conversation in my father tongue without clumsy pauses and stuttering.
But I don't think I've lost the facility or fluency. No individual ever lost the speech that has nurtured him or her from infancy. It will come back when the speaker has to use it regularly. In my dreams when I see dead relatives and loved ones, I converse with them in my childhood speech, not in English or, Heaven save me, Mandarin.
Hakka diction is grating to outsiders because of the predominance of the "ng" consonant as in "ngai" (I, my), "Hak-ngin" (Hakka folks) and "ngee" (you). Sometimes, an everyday expression can sound slightly comical to other Chinese, as in "hair-mm-hair", which means "Is it so?" I have to suppress a giggle when I was writing this down as it looks downright weird in English orthography.
--Francis Chin, Dec 30, 2001
