1. Little Devils and Knuckle Raps
Growing up, we had no idea our mother was Hakka; we didn’t even know she was Cantonese, from the Province of Canton. We were aware that her looks weren’t exactly like those of the people around us, and that her speech wasn’t exactly like everyone else’s at the hospital where she worked, but such things meant little to us kids. She was simply our mother, and that was it. And if we got into mischief and she came running after us with a tree twig, she was just one of those big people, and when they were running after you like that, you just got scared like hell. But that was it. There was nothing in our minds that would separate Mother from the other people around us.
Then our little sister arrived, and Po Po, our maternal grandma, came from another province to help. But even the arrival of Grandma made no difference as far as the life of us kids went. Grandma had a sharp, oval-shaped face, deep-set eyes, sallow cheeks, and, even though she must have been in her fifties or something, thick long hair, which she combed every morning sitting on a low stool by the stove, seemingly planning to go on combing forever.
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Po Po was that she spoke like none of the people around here, including Mother when she was with her coworkers and neighbors. No one could understand Po Po except Mother. But even this extraordinary thing about Po Po made no difference to us kids. For before long, we were doing the same—we spoke to her in her own language, to the astonishment of the neighborhood kids we played with in those days.
At that time, Po Po was already well on her way to looking like the typical witch in Disney movies—large, unsettling eyes in those deep eye sockets, partially caved-in cheeks, and long nails on the fingers that were always pointing or wagging at us while she spoke in Hakka.
That was at the start of the Cultural Revolution, and our father was deposed from his office and sent to the country to earn his living as a peasant. Po Po would sometimes pull us aside when we ran home for water. And with her long nails and her foreign speech that by now had also become our speech, she would say things like, “Your papa is a those-in-power.” She would move her teeth and tongue around in her mouth as if chewing something, a worried but resigned look on her wrinkled forehead.
Sometimes, if we did something really bad, she would lift one hand, the back of it toward our heads, and threaten us in her foreign speech: “死鬼里, guai cuo guai ni si!” (“You want some knuckle raps, don’t you, little devils!”)
2. Uncles and QQs
As I got older, something started to change in my mind, and perhaps in my heart as well. I gradually found myself fascinated by bits of family saga dropped by Mother or Po Po now and then. My ears became keenly tuned to what they were saying—about Mother herself, her background, her siblings. When they mentioned qq’s—that’s how you say uncles in Hakka—we realized that we, like the other kids in the neighborhood, had uncles and cousins too.
You started to feel that those anecdotal things about the family had something to do with you, that when they spoke about the family, and the way they did it, in a tongue no one here understood, they somehow were talking about you too.
But all through secondary school, I was always confused about many things concerning my mother’s side of our family. My mom, a native of Xinning, or Shin-ning as she pronounced it with her Hakka accent, bore the family name Huang, which, in her twisted Cantonese tongue, always came out as Wong.
Side note: those of you born in Chinatown in the US, your family name is not Wong, but Huang. The problem is with your Hakka tongue. 🤭
Through family chats by the fireside, we picked up anecdotal stories about the Wong family. Over time, bit by bit, a legend began to form in our young minds—a family saga of some sort, if you will.
The Wongs were a wealthy, land-owning gentry clan with an impressive ancestral pedigree, with one of their forebears having served as an officer in the military of the first Republic, and who might have had something to do with Sun Yat-sen. The wealth of the family and the kind of comfort they enjoyed I gleaned from things Mother accidentally mentioned: land and houses; a jade wrist ring she had been given to wear; the gold and other jewelry the family later had to pawn to buy penicillin for the family’s only male heir when he fell ill with pneumonia; her sisters’ dowries when they got married; the sharecroppers who worked for them; and so on.
Whenever my mother mentioned her mom, she would refer to her as “my mother in the Wong family.” When I was a child, I always thought that was a very peculiar way of referring to one’s own mom. But then what did I know? I was merely a child, and she was someone who spoke a different tongue—or, more precisely, someone who could switch to a different tongue from ours any time she wanted to, and often did. Plus, there were so many things about her and her background that I could not fathom.
When you are small, family legends are not just anecdotes about some strangers you feel strangely excited about every time you hear their names mentioned, for the millionth time. They are more than that. They go to your heart and begin to shape your conception of yourself. So you listen intensely, in awe. You savor all the little details, and you accept them with unquestioning faith, the way ancient people listened to tales about their ancestors, their clan’s beginnings, stories about eagles or turtles or whatnot. The tales we picked up at our mother’s knee were our own family’s genesis, its sacred tales. Every time you heard them, you became starry-eyed, and you felt your breath being taken away.
3. The Other Grandma
Back then, in grade school, there were many occasions when you had to fill out a form, like when you applied for membership in the Red Scarf, or the Young Pioneers, as it was called in those days. You were always required to put down your parents’ names and class classification on these forms. We always chose to put down our mother’s name and class if we could get away with it, because the other choice was to put down our father’s. We didn’t want to do that, because everyone at school knew who our father was and what had become of him. But the main reason was his social class—landowner.
For our mother’s name, it was always Wong for us. That was her official name, the name she used at work. But Mom also had a different name, with a different family name, which was Lee rather than Wong. This name she never used at work, or anywhere else, or in any other capacity.
For a long time, it was just a name to me. When it was mentioned, nothing got stirred up; little came to mind. When the name Wong was mentioned, images of Mother as a young girl at the loom came up, images of her gentle, loving brother to whom she had been given as a child wife came to mind, along with emotions you did not know how to describe. Along with these were images of gold and shiny things. But all the name Lee brought to mind was Grandma, standing in the courtyard of her humble house after rain, with a broomstick in her hands.
Then one day Grandma, or Po Po, as mentioned before, came to live with us. That was when we learned that Po Po’s family name was Lee, that she had three sons and a daughter, who was my mother, whom Grandma had given away to the Wong family as a child wife.
The three uncles were all Lees: 李安仁, 李汉仁, and 李怀仁, the youngest of the three. Mother turned out to have a double name—in addition to being a Wong, she was also a Lee: 李金英, or, in Hakka, Li Kin Reng.
This was all new and exciting.
The three newly gained qq’s were absolute legends to us. My eldest uncle was among New China’s first generation of engineers, and my second uncle was in the air force and had been trained to be a fighter pilot. The youngest, whom both Mother and Po Po referred to as 怀仔古, Huai Zai Gu—a nickname to the absolute delight of us kids—was ten years younger than my mother. He was a graduate of the prestigious Beijing Normal University and was a teacher in another province.
All three uncles were constantly mentioned in conversations between my mother and my grandma, with the youngest one referred to as “Huai Zai Gu,” and the second as “Han Gu,” but the endearment “-gu” was never applied to the engineer.
Why was the eldest uncle always referred to by his proper name, while the other two had nicknames? And why were they so called?
Years later, when I had gone to university, I learned something about Italian and Russian names that reminded me very much of names in Hakka. In Italian, affectionate or diminutive forms of names can be made with endings such as “-ino/-ina,” “-etto/-etta,” or “-uccio/-uccia.” So Paolo can become Paolino, Maria Mariuccia. Russian does much the same thing in its own way, producing all those affectionate forms of ordinary names that sound so different from the names themselves.
It occurred to me that the Hakka “-gu” added to a boy’s name seemed to be doing something very similar. So “that boy Han,” or “Han Gu,” made perfect sense as a nickname for my second uncle. But the third one, being the youngest in the family, was called by his own mother and sister “Huai Zai Gu”—“Huai the little devil,” or, in Italian, Huai the birichino.
It had never occurred to me that this was how Mom and Grandma had been talking about my uncles all those years, calling them, in effect, their own Igorushkas, Paolinos, and Giovanninos.
4. Me and My Hakka Cousin
Many years after I had moved away from home, one of my cousins—the daughter of my mom’s oldest brother—finally made the trip to see my mother and, for the first time, stepped into the room I used to occupy. Up there in the bookcase was a photo of me, placed there by my mother, no doubt. When she saw it, saw my aged face, worn down by life and bearing little resemblance to the young man she had once met and remembered, she broke down.
I knew that not because I was there as an eyewitness. Far from it. I was five thousand miles away. I knew it from the words my mother used when telling me about my cousin’s visit. You don’t have to be a genius to know what happened in that room that day. If someone could not take her eyes off a photograph, could not move away from it despite having another person beside her, as if her feet had been planted in the ground, while her eyes were full of disbelief and her speech became incoherent, anyone would know something was going on. And that was what my cousin was like that day.
My mother was the only one who saw all this, and yet, in another sense, also the only person who was there that morning and did not see any of it.
“Your cousin cried, and just kept crying when I showed her the photo of you with your family,” Mother told me. “And she just kept saying, ‘This can’t be. This just can’t be!’”
Mother was genuinely puzzled by her niece’s strong reaction. She attributed it to my tired, worn-out, aged look in the picture. “You did look a bit old in that photo,” she said, “and your face showed the wear and tear of life on you.”
Mother was too kind, too lovingly motherly, both to me and to the only daughter of her eldest brother, to think that there might have been something else behind her breakdown. I could not blame her. How could I? She was my mother, who had carried me for nine months in her womb, and she loved me as she loved her niece, the daughter of her eldest brother—my first cousin.
In the year I turned twenty-four, I was accepted by a university in the north as a graduate student. When I traveled north for school that fall, I stopped in Luoyang to visit Po Po, who was then in her late sixties. The train dropped me off at Luoyang Station in the early hours of the morning. The sun wasn’t up yet, but the streets were already waking and people were moving about. It was my first time in this legendary city.
Luoyang had been chosen in the early years of the People’s Republic as one of the sites for the huge Soviet-model factories that were to help industrialize the new country. The factories were built, along with workshops and vast blocks of employee housing. By the time I arrived, much of the grandeur of those plans had faded, but the factories and their Soviet-style housing remained.
That was the Luoyang I walked into that morning. I went from one boxlike housing unit to another, all of them looking identical except for their building numbers.
All those years I had been told that after Grandma left us, she had gone to Luoyang to live with her eldest son—the uncle with no nickname. I also knew that this uncle had since passed away, leaving behind a son and a daughter. For this trip, I was going to stay at my cousin’s place.
The sun was just coming up over the flat horizon of the central plain when I finally found the apartment building. The rest is mostly a blur now. I don’t remember how I entered the apartment or how I greeted my cousin and his small child, who must have been four or five. But I still remember entering Grandma’s little room and letting her hold my hands while I struggled to understand the string of words coming out of her mouth.
It was all Hakka.
Unlike my mother, whose Hakka had been changed by years of living and working among people who did not speak the language, Grandma still spoke the Hakka of her village. I had spoken Hakka with Po Po when she lived with us, and on my way to Luoyang I had been confident that experience would save the day. That confidence disappeared within moments of seeing her. I could barely follow what she was saying. My confusion and embarrassed look bemused both my cousin and his wife.
Around noon, my other cousin came to her brother’s place to meet me.
She turned out to be a robust girl my own age, full-bodied and full of life, with twinkling eyes and a contagious, irresistible laugh.
I was not prepared to meet a cousin, let alone one whose very presence would turn things inside me upside down. Up to that point, all I had was the concept of a cousin. I knew I was going to meet a girl cousin, but seeing this heap of sunshine standing in front of me was a bit earth-shattering.
All my life until then, we had had few contacts with relatives. When I started grade school and heard my classmates talk about their uncles and cousins, I always felt a little jealous. Having no relatives coming to visit, no relatives for us to go and visit, getting lost when other people started throwing kinship terms around—that was the norm for us.
But right there in front of me, laughing and looking at me with twinkling eyes, was a real cousin. She was one of two cousins in that room with me and our grandma, who was speaking in a language everyone present understood except me.
That afternoon my cousin took me to the factory where she worked so I could have a shower. As we walked down a flower-lined lane between the factory buildings, I was overcome by a strange and powerful sensual feeling I had never experienced before. My cousin walked beside me, gesturing and explaining what the buildings were and what part of the manufacturing process took place in each. She wore a short black dress with white dots and black sandals with straps. Under the open sky and the bright sun, with her black hair moving in the wind, her presence seemed overpowering. I could feel my breathing becoming short and rapid. I had a strong desire to look at her, but some fear kept me from doing so as we walked.
When we reached the bathhouse, she told me that if I finished first, I should wait for her, and then she disappeared into the women’s side. On our way back, we talked about going to visit her mother, who had remarried after my uncle’s death, and about doing some sightseeing over the next few days.
I was in my early twenties then, my hair long and my face pale, a quiet and shy young man who would rather stay with his books than go out and meet the world. It was known in our family that I had inherited more of my mother’s facial features than my siblings had—high cheekbones and soft facial contours.
From my cousin’s excited gestures and the way she spoke, fast and sometimes almost incoherently, I could tell that she was just as surprised and excited at meeting the cousin she had heard about but had never seen.
That night, after more chats with Po Po, I lay down on the makeshift bed they had prepared for me in Grandma’s room. I could see Gran’s silhouette in the dim light from the window. She was sitting up in her bed, her mouth constantly moving, as if she were chewing something.
I lay there in the dark thinking about what had happened during that first day with my grandma and my cousins. I thought of my cousin in her short black dress, her black hair in the wind. I thought she was beautiful, outgoing, and full of energy—the very things I lacked. And I could not explain to myself why meeting her had been so overwhelming.
I thought having a cousin had to be one of the best things that could ever happen to a person. I thought my cousin was the luckiest person in the world because she spoke Hakka and could talk to Gran without any trouble, whereas I knew only a few words and could hardly make a complete sentence without making an error.
Excited as I was at meeting my cousin, I had other exciting things going on in my life. In a few days I would leave Luoyang and continue my journey north to the university, where I would begin my life as a graduate student. That future was a great unknown to me. It was itself like some mysterious land beckoning from farther north.
What I did not know that day, and had no way of knowing, was what my arrival in Luoyang had done to my cousin. I would not begin to understand that until many years later, when my mother told me about a morning in the room I had left behind, and a photograph on the bookcase that my cousin could not take her eyes off.
5. A Kindergartener and a Monk
Lately, it seems I have trouble keeping TikTok from feeding me videos about Hakka stuff—the food, the festivals, the language, the history. I figure it must be because every time I come across a video of this type, my eyes beam light back at the screen and my finger pauses the swiping.
And I absolutely cannot watch a Hakka video on TikTok without cracking up, sometimes so hard and so uncontrollably that my non-Hakka wife thinks I must have gone mad. She cannot understand why someone would laugh so hard when to her there is nothing in these videos even remotely funny.
But I can’t help it. So I keep pausing and cracking up, to the annoyance of my Mandarin-speaking wife.
Don’t get me wrong. The problem isn’t me. It’s those Hakka ways of saying things. Fix them before you try to fix me.
I mean, just look at a simple example. Everyone knows the words 衣裳, yi shang, clothing, and 穿着, chuan zhuo, attire. A normal Chinese-speaking person says 穿衣, chuan yi, “putting on clothes.” But no, these wicked Hakka people take the other two and say 着裳, zhuo shang.
And you know what? That’s how the ancients spoke!
I once watched a video in which a Hakka kindergarten teacher was quizzing her students on how to say in Hakka things they would normally say in Mandarin. The kid next in line got the question: “How do you say du zi er—hungry?”
Before I knew it, out of the mouth of this kindergartener came words I knew from a monk in the congregation of the great Zen master Baizhang Huaihai, whose recorded sayings I had spent years studying at one point in my career:
请镢地次，忽有一僧闻鼓鸣，举镢头大笑，便归。百丈曰：俊哉！此是观音入理之门。僧归院，唤问：适来见什么道理？曰：适来肚饥，闻鼓声归吃饭。丈乃笑。
A monk is out hoeing the ground when he hears the meal drum. He raises his hoe, laughs, and goes back. Baizhang thinks the monk has attained some marvelous insight and asks him what truth he saw.
The monk tells him, essentially: “I was hungry. I heard the drum, so I came back to eat.”
We’re talking about a monk who lived in the Tang dynasty.
In other words, this Hakka kindergartener speaks as though somebody had turned the clock back thirteen hundred years.
6. “Grandpa Heaven, You Rain Down Showers”
Mother lived by herself after she retired. Most of the time she was with her nanny, a local woman who spoke a variant of Mandarin. There would be days when no one visited, and often months would go by before she got a call from one of her Hakka classmates from her nursing-school days.
She did not seem to care. Perhaps in her own mind she was simply a local, like everyone else around her. After all, she had come to Yunnan to attend nursing school when she was sixteen, and she had never left.
The last time I was with her was a month before her death. It was Chinese New Year. In addition to the usual things she would tell us, we learned two things she had never told us before.
One had to do with her and a sister when they were in their village school. Her sister’s name was 李全英, and my mother’s was 李金英. The difference between the middle characters is that one has two dots, one on each side, and the other does not. When taking attendance, instead of calling the sisters by their names, the teacher would call, “The one with the dots?”
“Here!” my mother would answer.
“The one without the dots?”
“Here!” her sister would answer.
We loved the story, mostly because it was something she had never told us before.
The other story had to do with an accident that nearly ended in an inconceivable disaster.
There was a pond and a well just outside the Wong compound. When vegetables were washed for a meal, they were first washed in the pond, and then water was drawn from the well to rinse them again. My mother was small at the time, about five. One day, when she dropped her bucket into the well, she went in with it.
A stepsister happened to be working nearby and had seen her by the pond. When she looked again and saw no sign of her, she immediately knew something was wrong and ran to the well.
Her sister saved her life.
Years later, when this sister was getting married and was about to get into the red sedan chair, my mother went to her father and asked for a red envelope to give her. When it was handed to her, she ran to the sedan chair and gave the gift to her sister. The next day, when her father went into town to the teahouse, he proudly told the story to everyone he came across.
It all seems a little strange now. Strange that this particular incident from her childhood should have come back to her on this particular occasion, for in one month’s time she would be gone.
One night this year, probably a weekend, I was staying up late, swiping through TikTok, when I came across a Hakka song sung by a white woman. I knew enough to know it was Hakka. I wasn’t familiar with the song, but its simplicity moved me, as did her ungarnished singing.
I looked into it. It turned out to be an old Hakka folk song, and the woman singing it was British and had lived among the Hakka in Taiwan for years. I liked her rendition but found the pronunciation of certain words not quite Hakka to my ears. So I searched some more and found another version, apparently from a movie or something of that sort.
Eventually I found the lyrics. They went something like this:
Grandpa Heaven, you rain down showers;
lovely little sister, you come to the pond, wearing only a straw hat.
The water in the pond is clear,
and fish swim in it, this way and that.
Something hit me, and hit me hard.
I knew I was in some sort of trouble. My throat tightened, and I sensed I was teetering on the brink of something. I ran to my wife’s room, trying to tell her about my discovery, how beautiful the song was. But as I was telling her all this—the little sister, the pond, the fish swimming this way and that—I burst into uncontrollable sobs.
My wife was a little frightened. She had never seen me sob like that.
For days afterward, I was forbidden from mentioning anything remotely related to water, milk, or liquid, let alone a pond. Fish weren’t allowed either.
And their swimming this way and that?
Don’t even think about it.
Yego’s Chronicles 