Coincidences are an interesting thing. Sometimes you meet someone and you realize what a small world it is. Sometimes you expect to stay home all day, but instead you go out and learn something.
Anyway, I didn’t really expect to do anything today. I had an interview planned this evening, but there was a typhoon going on today, and upon finding out that the typhoon was supposed to become stronger in the evening, I contacted my interviewee and rescheduled the interview. So I pretty much stayed home and worked on transcribing.
Now let me tell you about transcribing. It’s an exhilarating experience. Now for those of you who have never transcribed an interview before, that was sarcasm. It’s very tedious, and a short clip can take hours to transcribe. It’s even worse when it’s Chinese. Fortunately, otranscribe.com is a great tool to use so I don’t need to keep on switching tabs. Since I’m transcribing in Chinese, what I’m doing is typing the phonetics with the alphabet, and then I’ll figure out the Chinese characters later. I don’t know if that’s the most efficient method, but hopefully it works. Anyway, oftentimes when I pause the audio clip, I end up getting distracted and going on Facebook and reading articles or something. So I only got one clip transcribed.
Late in the afternoon, my grandma told me that she has a cousin named Great Aunt Ou, whose husband wrote a Hakka dictionary! She suggested we go over to their house and chat.
Now here’s where coincidences come back into play. Throughout this trip there has been some interesting coincidences. I forgot to mention, when we went to the Hakka Cultural Park in Taoyuan and interviewed Liang Cheng Liang, Liang asked my grandma where she was from. She said she was from Guanyi, and then he mentioned someone he knew from there. The person he mentioned was actually my grandma’s cousin, and he was also Liang’s teacher!
Also apparently, Liang knows my Great Aunt Ou’s husband. My grandma and her cousin share the same great-grandparents. So I think that makes them second cousins? But actually they did not know each other until they met on a trip to China, and when they met each other, they realized they were related and live only a couple blocks from each other. Crazy stuff.
Sidenote: So the typhoon was still going on. I really have no idea what to make of typhoons. When I heard a typhoon was coming, it immediately worried me, and it was raining like crazy and the wind was howling. Plus a bunch of businesses closed for the day, and the bus service stopped. But the rain comes in bursts. So once the rain stopped for a moment, my grandma wanted me to go out, and I thought, isn’t there a typhoon going on? When we went out, there were a bunch of people taking walks, jogging and walking their dogs. I couldn’t help thinking, shouldn’t you stay inside to be safe? What if you get washed away by the rain? It could come back any moment! So yeah, I have no idea.
Anyway, we went over to their house just to chat, and they talked a lot about the Hakka language, the history of the Taiwanese Hakka people, and the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. This wasn’t a formal interview, but I learned a lot of interesting things from the conversation, so I’m going to try to record as much of it as possible here. Great Aunt Ou is 88, and her husband, Great Uncle Zhang, is 90, but they’re both still pretty healthy. The husband used to be a principal, and like I mentioned before, he wrote a Hakka dictionary. He gave me a copy and explained to me about the Hakka language. The dictionary features Chinese characters and its pronunciations in Mandarin and two types of Hakka: si xian and hai lu (this is what my grandma speaks). Hakka and Mandarin are actually similar, but vowels are different and so is the tone. Both types of Hakka tend to differ by tone.
I asked him why he decided to write a dictionary, and he said he started writing it after he retired. In 2001, the Taiwanese government started requiring “mother tongue education,” where primary school students had to learn a native Taiwanese tongue, such as Hakka and Taiwanese (also called mi nan hua). However, many teachers did not know Hakka, and they needed something to teach from. That’s why he started writing this dictionary, and it took him about 10 years. He had to do extensive research to include every character and the correct pronunciations for both types of Hakka.
He also talked about the history of the Hakka people in Taiwan. The Hakka have been migrating south since the Qin Dynasty to escape social unrest and invasions, and the came to Taiwan at the end of the Ming Dynasty and at the beginning of the Qing Dynasty. They had to live in the mountains because the Hoklos (the majority of Taiwan who speak Taiwanese or mi nan hua, who come from the Chinese region of Fujian) took all the good land on the ground. That’s why the Hakka are known for being able to withstand hardship.
Also, he talked about the Hakka in China. Apparently, they build circular houses, so when Americans sent satellites around the world to take photos, the Americans were shocked to see circles in satellite photographs of China. They thought they were UFO’s, when in reality they were just Hakka houses.
Their children know how to speak Hakka, but out of their grandchildren, only three can understand Hakka now. We told him that when we interviewed Liang, he said that fewer people speak Hakka now because parents don’t really speak it to their children, and also, people are less likely to live with their grandparents now. In an environment where the majority of people usually speak Mandarin or Taiwanese, Hakka is not often used, other than when speaking with family. Great Uncle Zhang also said Hakka is being phased out because of how similar it is to Mandarin, so Mandarin is quickly replacing Hakka as the language Hakka people usually use.
Both my grandma’s cousin and her husband encouraged learning new languages. They know Mandarin, Taiwanese, Hakka and Japanese. So here is something very new I learned. I knew that my grandparents on both sides were affected by Japanese invasion. My grandparents from my dad’s side are from the Philippines, and I recall my grandma telling me about how when the Japanese invaded, they had to escape to safety by crossing a river on a bridge made of only two bamboo sticks and two ropes to hold balance. My grandma in Taiwan was telling me the other day that when she was very little, when the Japanese dropped bombs on Taiwan, she went outside to see what was going on. Her mom immediately pulled her inside and spanked her. Other than that, I didn’t know much about the Japanese occupation.
My grandma was a little kid during the Japanese occupation, but my grandma’s cousin and her husband are much older than my grandma, so they were students during then. So in schools, they had to learn Japanese, and they read Chinese characters as Japanese (since the Japanese language actually borrows many Chinese characters). When they were younger, they knew how to speak Hakka (because it was their language at home) and Japanese (because they had to learn it at school), but they did not know how to speak Mandarin. So once the Japanese left, and Mandarin was taught as the dominant languages in schools, they then had to learn it. I was really surprised to learn that they knew Japanese before they knew Mandarin.
While my research focuses on young Hakka people, this couple definitely has an interesting perspective. They are probably some of the oldest Hakka people currently living in Taiwan, and they are very knowledgeable about their language and culture. They offered to show me some Hakka clothing they owned so I could take photographs. I’d definitely like to talk to them again.
Anyway, I really need to go to sleep now. Tomorrow the plan is to go to a Hakka cultural park in Miaoli, but we have to catch a 6:11 a.m. train!