Identity Talk: 自己人 (Gaginang)

Happy Saturday everyone!

Wow, it's hard to believe how time flies; it seems like just yesterday that I had been blogging about my experiences with the Taiwanese after being here for only a month and a half and now, all of a sudden, I only have about a month and a half left before the end of the semester!

Anyways, today we have a special post inspired by a video I saw on YouTube recently by the Fung bros (and yes, they are actual brothers). For those of you that have never seen their videos, they do a lot of comedy, some music, and lots of vlogging about Asian culture and identity (especially food). Taken from the "about" section of their YouTube page, the Fung bros are "brothers who believe in advancing the education and discussion of Asian and Asian-American topics for people around the world."

They recently did a food video about Chiu Chow food, which was followed up by a video about Chiu Chow identity and this latter video was what inspired today's blog post.

Chiu Chow, for those of you that may not know, is a city in the Chaoshan region of Guangdong in the southeastern part of China. Chiu Chow (which is actually based off the Cantonese pronunciation) can also be romanized as Chaozhou (based off the Mandarin pronunciation) or Teochew (based off well, the Teochew pronunciation).

Name: 潮州

English: Teochew, Chiu Chow, Chaozhou

Location: 潮汕 (Chaoshan) in 廣東 (Guangdong)

Dialect: 潮州話 (often referred to as Teochew in English)

The language of Teochew is a member of the Southern Min or Min Nan (Traditional: 閩南話/Simplified: 闽南语) language family and as such, is not mutually intelligible with either Mandarin or Cantonese. In fact, it is bears many similarities to Taiwanese (臺灣話/臺話) and Hokkien (福建話), both of which are also Min Nan languages. In fact, Teochew is considered one of the most conservative of Chinese dialects because many of the archaic pronunciations and vocabulary of Old Chinese, or Archaic Chinese, has been retained in Teochew where they might no longer exist in some of the more modern dialects (Mandarin, by contrast, is considered a relatively new dialect).

 So why the interest in this seemingly random topic? Much of my posts, and this whole blog in fact, is dedicated to documenting the experience of an Asian-American in East Asia, but I thought it would be nice to switch it up for a change and talk about what it's like to be an Asian-American in the U.S. The biggest and main reason however is that I was really able to connect to the topics they mentioned in the video because my family is actually of Teochew descent.

And so, without further ado, I present to you Chiu Chow Identity Talk with the Fung bros:

As mentioned in the video, the Chiu Chow diaspora saw the rise of Chiu Chow communities outside of China in places such as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Singapore. Like Olivia's family, my own family is 越南華僑, meaning that they are of Chinese descent, but lived in Vietnam. In addition to Vietnamese and Teochew, my family can also speak Mandarin and Cantonese, but as my surname is a Vietnamese surname, growing up I too was confused about whether I was Vietnamese or Chinese. In fact, since I had never met anyone outside my family who spoke Teochew, I was, for the longest time convinced that it was a made-up language that only my family spoke. 

Another thing mentioned in the video by Kane was that growing up, he was upset about being Teochew, because it was not one of the mainstream Chinese, which I can completely relate to. I grew up in 唐人街, Manhattan Chinatown, which is a predominantly Cantonese neighborhood. As such, a lot of my Chinese friends are Cantonese and spoke Cantonese at home and to each other and while I could understand bits and pieces of what they were saying I felt like it was not something I could really be a part of and I was upset that I didn't have anyone to talk to in my mother tongue (although I have forgotten a lot of my Teochew now). I remember thinking, why couldn't I be Cantonese? and the fact that I was Teochew was a big deal to me because a lot of my friends, both Chinese and non-Chinese, had never even heard of Chiu Chow and I really did feel like this weird subgroup. 

So while I might tell my Chinese friends who ask that I'm Chiu Chow, to my non-Chinese friends, I'll just say Chinese and when they ask if I speak Mandarin or Cantonese at home, I'll just tell them it's another dialect that doesn't really have an English name.

Being in Taiwan though has made me more open to outright saying that I am Chaozhou, partly because Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese students are a lot more likely to have heard of it, partly because I can just say 潮州話 instead of explaining in English, and partly because for those that don't know it, I can simply say, oh it's sort of like Taiwanese, which people will know. 

Actually a fellow student in my Chinese class back at Conn, is also Teochew (coincidentally enough, her name is Lily), and when we found out, we both got quite excited because we had never met any other Teochew person outside of our families and spent the next few minutes speaking in Teochew (or attempting to anyways--her Teochew is a lot better than mine). Even among fellow Teochew speakers however, because her family was from Cambodia, there were some differences in the ways we might pronounce some words or even in the word choices we'd use, so that was kind of interesting.

Seeing as this post has gone on long enough, I shall end here, and if you liked the video you can also check out some of the other works of the Fung Bros (they also did videos on Cantonese, Vietnamese, and Singaporean identities). Have a wonderful weekend everybody!