Liu Huei-chen (劉慧真), had left her hometown in northern Taiwan at the age of sixteen to attend high school and university in Taipei. After five years away from home, when she was halfway through undergraduate studies, she was called back to the small farming village of Chungli to visit her dying grandfather. The occasion was especially heartbreaking. Face to face again with the octogenarian, she found that she could barely communicate with him. She had forgotten much of her native tongue, Hakka, and her grandfather had never learned Mandarin. "He could hardly see me," says Liu, "and I could hardly speak the only language he knew."
For the first time in her life, Liu regretted not maintaining proficiency in the language of her ancestors. She had grown up in a town populated mostly by Hakka, the largest Chinese ethnic minority group in Taiwan, but after moving to Taipei, Liu had led a lifestyle with virtually no trace of her Hakka upbringing. Most of her friends and classmates were Fukienese, descendants of immigrants from southern Fukien province. Like them, she spoke Mandarin and Southern Fukienese—known locally as "Taiwanese"—and spent much of her free time cramming for various school entrance exams, watching TV, or hanging out at U.S.-style fast-food restaurants.
Today, Liu is 25 and is completing a master's degree in history at National Taiwan Normal University. She is writing her thesis on nineteenth century relations between Taiwan's indigenous tribes, the Fukienese (who started moving in large numbers to Taiwan in the mid-seventeenth century), and the Hakka (who came to the island on a large scale from Kwangtung and other southern provinces a few decades later). Once again, she has found herself regretting her lack of language skills. "Without speaking Hakka, I can't collect firsthand stories from the elderly," she says. Now, she is learning the language nearly from scratch. ''I'm so ashamed!" she says. ''I actually have to enroll in Hakka language classes."
Many of Taiwan's young Hakka are in Liu's position. While their parents spoke to each other in the dialect (ke-chia hua in Mandarin), they did not make their children learn it. Liu spoke only Mandarin with her parents and classmates. Even while still living in a Hakka community, she and her classmates had already begun assimilating into mainstream Taiwan culture.
"Hakka" means "guest" in Cantonese. According to the most common theory on the origins of the group, the Hakka refer to a group of Han Chinese landowners or, some believe, Han royalty, who fled from northern mainland China to the south during warfare with foreign invaders in the fourth century. Because they eventually settled in the Cantonese-speaking south, Westerners know the group by their Cantonese name. The Hakka made four other large-scale migrations, the last in the mid-1800s. Even in the southern provinces, they were a migrant group, periodically moving to new regions in search of farmland or to escape warfare.
The first few Hakka men arrived in Taiwan in the early seventeenth century. These early settlers developed a reputation for being clannish, shrewd, lawless, and rough, in part because of an imperial decree that forbade women and children from moving to Taiwan. Most early Hakka immigrants worked as tenant farmers to Fukienese settlers. In almost all official documentation, the Hakka were depicted as social outcasts. "Whenever the Hakka were mentioned in county records, they were the villains," says Hakka scholar Chen Yun-tung (陳運棟), author of The Hakka of Taiwan (1989). "They stole, they provoked fights, they committed adultery. They were a bunch of no-good, low-life migrating tenants." This image did not improve until the end of the seventeenth century, when Hakka migration increased and they began bringing their families to Taiwan.
Like the Fukienese (who now generally refer to themselves as Taiwanese), the Hakka first landed in the southern city of Tainan, where they faced hostility from both the Taiwanese settlers and the indigenous tribes. Conflicts were frequent and bloody. The worst clash took place during the Chu Yi-kuei Rebellion against the Ching dynasty authorities in 1721. Initially, Hakka and Taiwanese were united against the authorities, but after a power struggle split the two groups, the Hakka gained a reputation for siding with the Ching rulers and relations between the two groups remained strained for decades.
Professor Peng Chin-ching fears his is the last generation of Taiwan Hakka to speak the dialect—"It is an irreversible trend for non-mainstream language speakers to learn the mainstream language."
The final major wave of Hakka came to Taiwan during the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864). When the rebels lost, thousands of Hakka supporters of the rebels left mainland China for Taiwan and other destinations. By the time this batch of immigrants arrived on the island, the Hakka had set up communities islandwide, but they moved increasingly to the north—today's center of the Hakka population.
Although no official count of the group has been taken recently, a 1956 census shows that the Hakka then numbered roughly 1.2 million, or 15 percent of the Taiwan's population. At the time, most were concentrated in the northwestern counties of Taoyuan, Hsinchu, and Miaoli. Statistics have not been updated, but most researchers believe the Hakka distribution has remained unchanged.
Using housing registration information, researchers estimate that the Hakka population is now between 2 million and 5 million. Chen Yun-tung puts the number at 3 million, still around 15 percent of the population. The widely varying numbers show that Hakka are hard to trace; as fellow Han, they look no different from other Chinese immigrant groups, and the language and cultural differences that separated them from the Taiwanese are quickly fading.
Who are the Hakka? In mainland China, they make up the fifth largest linguistic group, after those who speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, and Fukienese. About 20 million people on the mainland speak Hakka; internationally, 50 million speak it. Despite having spent centuries living as a minority amid other ethnic groups, the Hakka long maintained a distinct culture. Much of it reflects the hardships they endured as unwelcomed outsiders. For instance, while most Chinese ethnic groups prior to the twentieth century bound the feet of their upper class women, no Hakka women did this. The main reason was that the women were needed to work in the fields.
Many of their beliefs were shaped by a history of frequent relocation. For example, while other Han groups celebrate national Tomb-sweeping Day on April 5, the Hakka celebrate it on any day between January 16 and April 5. The flexible schedule was originally adopted to give them time to travel back to distant ancestral burial sites.
Other burial customs also reflect their history of mobility. After years of relocation, the Hakka began burying their dead only temporarily; after four or five years, the remains are removed and kept in an urn, which can be carried with the family. Traditionally, Hakka believed that eventually they would return to their original homeland in northern China, where they could bury their dead permanently. In villages with a large concentration of Hakka, many families still keep burial urns in their back yards.
Much of Hakka religion also belies the time they spent in various parts of China. For example, the practice of worshipping the Gods of Three Mountains, central to Hakka religion, originated in a hilly coastal region of Kwangtung and has been transported elsewhere, including Taiwan. The gods refer to three brothers who, legend has it, saved an emperor during the Sung dynasty, then refused the ruler's offer to give them high government positions. They are considered the "guardian angels of the Hakka," and their protective powers are so respected that non-Hakka now also worship them. In Taiwan, there are 145 temples dedicated to the Gods of Three Mountains, thirty-four in Ilan county alone. The oldest one, dating back approximately four hundred years, is in Hsihu, west-central Taiwan.
Worship of the Yi Min, or "righteous citizens," is another unique Hakka custom. The Yi Min are men who died defending their ethnic group in battle. In Taiwan, the Hakka honor these men on the anniversaries of several significant local battles in which the Hakka clashed with the Taiwanese, including the Chu Yi-kuei Rebellion (1721), the Lin Shuang-wen Rebellion (1786), and the Tai Chao-tsun Rebellion (1862). There are twenty-one Yi Min temples around the island. The best known, located in the northern town of Hsinpu, holds the remains of more than five hundred Hakka fighters.
Even Hakka music reflects the pattern of migration. It focuses on a style called pa-yin, or eight sounds, which refers to eight categories of musical instruments. Pa-yin incorporates different musical styles the group adapted from various Chinese regional styles which they learned while living in different southern provinces. One of the best known forms of Hakka theater is tea-picking drama, which incorporates dialogue and music. The dramas often focus on a love story with only three characters: a male, a female, and a comic figure. The dramas are known for their "mutual banter" exchanges between the characters. Early tea-picking drama incorporated authentic folk songs sung by tea farmers at work and depicted stories set amid tea farms. Modern tea-picking drama is more similar to Peking opera in costuming and style, but it maintains the use of Hakka language.
One of the central aspects of Hakka culture is the importance placed on education. While education has been stressed by many Chinese ethnic groups, the Hakka are famed for their determination to seek an education despite poverty and hardship. Traditionally, extended families had at least one family shrine and until the 1940s, it was fairly common for these to double as a community school. Today, the tradition of making education a high priority continues. For example, the southern Hakka town of Meinung, with fifty thousand residents, is famous for having produced more than eighty Ph.D.s in the past forty years—the highest percentage among towns islandwide.
HAPA director Chung Chao-cheng—"The Hakka seem to have withdrawn from public life. They don't want others to know that they are Hakka. They don't speak their mother tongue. The image of the Hakka is dwindling."
The Hakka's worship of the Tang dynasty essayist and poet Han Yu (韓愈), sometimes called Chang-li, also shows their respect for education. A modern Chang-li temple stands in Neipu, Pingtung county. Although this is the only such temple left standing, some Hakka homes have small shrines dedicated to him. In another show of respect for education, most traditional Hakka communities include a public pavilion for burning all papers with words written or printed on them (although few of them are actually used any more). Tu Chun-ching (涂春景), editor-in-chief of Hakka Monthly grew up in a Hakka neighborhood of Miaoli and remembers his grandmother carefully separating printed paper from the rest of the household refuse, even the papers used to wrap meat from the butcher. "My grandma regarded newspapers as something sacred," Tu says. "She wouldn't allow us to sit or step on them."
Despite their academic accomplishments, Taiwan's Hakka are facing a severe identity crisis. After four hundred years of living in a society dominated by other Chinese groups, many have lost or abandoned their culture. "Hakka are the invisible group," says Luo Chao-chin (羅肇錦), a linguist and professor at National Taipei Teachers College. Luo believes that economic weakness has been a major reason for the dwindling Hakka culture. The original Hakka farming communities have rapidly declining populations. "Hakka communities are located in less fertile areas," he explains. "Many Hakka have left their hometowns in search of a better life. Thus, Hakka communities are losing manpower and cannot form a strong economic base."
And when Hakka youth move to the cities, many downplay or even hide their ethnic roots. "When Hakka venture out of their traditional communities, they mingle with Taiwanese neighbors and acquire their language and customs," Luo says. "Being afraid of possible discrimination, they dare not identify themselves as a different ethnic group."
As a result, there are few examples of highly successful Hakka business people. Among Taiwan's top 100 manufacturing companies, none are owned by Hakka—at least not by Hakka that have made public their ethnicity. The highest ranking Hakka-owned company, Kunnan Enterprise Ltd., is placed 114th. Among the top 500 companies, only three other businesses are known to be owned by Hakka.
Perhaps because of their long history as poor outsiders, the Hakka have developed a reputation of being cautious and thrifty. "The Hakka tend to seek stable employment," says Luo Neng-ping (羅能平), secretary-general of the Taiwan Hakka Association for Public Affairs (HAPA), a non-profit group begun in 1990 to promote Hakka language and culture. "Through hard work and loyalty, many of them grow to be the backbone of the institutions they work for. But Hakka don't climb to the top in the private or the public sector. They are not the gutsy type." Another reason that there seem to be few highly successful Hakka entrepreneurs is that many have hidden their ethnic identities in order to get ahead.
In terms of political power, the Hakka got off to a bad start in Taiwan. After two hundred years of clashing with the Taiwanese and the indigenous tribes, the Hakka gained little political power during the fifty-year Japanese occupation period (1895-1945). Their situation remained weak after the arrival of the Kuomintang (KMT) government in 1949. Today, they still lag behind the other two main Han ethnic groups: Taiwanese, who make up 70 percent of the population, and the mainlanders (those who immigrated to the island with the KMT government in 1949), who make up about 15 percent of the population.
But the Hakka do have several shining stars in the political arena. In fact, two of the ROC's most influential political leaders are of Hakka descent: Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), president of the Republic of China and head of the KMT, and Hsu Hsin-liang (許信良), head of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party. Peng Ming-min (彭明敏), a well-known leader in the Taiwan independence movement, is also Hakka. But overall political participation is low. None of the heads of the five branches (yuan) of government is Hakka, and among the seventeen top-level cabinet members, only Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄), minister of the interior, is a member of the ethnic group. In the 160-member legislature, only ten representatives are Hakka.
Huang Tse-yao (黃子堯), a Hakka poet and deputy secretary-general of HAPA, believes the group has maintained a low profile for good reason. "It could be that the Hakka culture de-emphasizes political participation," he says. "We were taught to concentrate on getting the best education we could and to stay out of politics."
Hakka legislator Lin Kwang-hua (林光華) argues that the Hakka have never had a voice in local politics. "The long history of being ignored has resulted in a lack of interest in political participation," he says. "Also, their early status as the outsider has left the Hakka withdrawn from public affairs. Politics is dirty and risky. Hakka would rather avoid it."
Professor Luo Chao-chin calls the Hakka "the invisible group." He sites a lack of economic strength, the exodus of the young from Hakka farming communities, and the rapid loss of the language as the main reasons that their culture is threatened.
Even within the social realm, Hakka seem to be uninterested in promoting their culture publicly. Chung Chao-cheng (鍾肇政), co-founder of HAPA, is frustrated by the relative apathy he has seen among Hakka during his two years with the association. "The Hakka seem to have withdrawn from public life," Chung says. "They don't want others to know that they are Hakka. They don't speak their mother tongue. The image of the Hakka is dwindling."
"Younger generations have a weak appreciation of Hakka ideology," says student activist Liu Huei-chen. She too has been frustrated by the lack of enthusiasm among her peers. Even those who take language classes seem to lack a cultural interest in it. "Their intention is to learn a skill for work, in case they are sent to a Hakka community," Liu says. "Few learn it out of an interest in their mother tongue."
The most serious problem facing the Hakka is the loss of the language. "The Hakka population would shrink quite a bit if language were the basis of taking a census—many Hakka either can't or won't speak the dialect," says Tu Chun-ching of Hakka Monthly. A recent survey of the five hundred primary school students in Miaoli city shows that, while 80 percent of the students are Hakka, only 30 percent could speak the language.
"Few young people speak the dialect," says professor Luo Chao-chin. His Hakka-dialect classes are full of young people with no Hakka skills. He stresses that the government campaign over the past four decades to promote Mandarin as the official language of the ROC has succeeded at the expense of all other dialects, including Hakka. "There is no law against using the other dialects," says Luo, "but the Mandarin promotion policy has been so extensive that the public has grown accustomed to thinking that only Mandarin can be used in public." Luo points out that the 1960s practice of school officials penalizing students caught speaking a dialect has left a lingering impression on Taiwan residents.
The penalties are gone today, but perhaps even more influential among young people is the peer pressure to speak the language of their classmates—either Mandarin or Taiwanese. While the government has recently loosened restrictions on the use of dialects in the media, many Hakka now complain that new opportunities are gobbled up by Taiwanese language programming, thus squeezing out all other dialects.
Intermarriage has also taken a toll on the language. The Hakka tradition of marrying only within the ethnic group has slipped away during the past few decades as Hakka have moved into urban areas. "It is an irreversible trend for non-mainstream language speakers to learn and speak the mainstream language," says Peng Chin-ching (彭欽清), an English professor at National Chengchi University. "It happens to immigrants all the time." Peng is a case in point. He married a Taiwanese and has not succeeded in teaching his two sons to speak Hakka. He fears that he is among the last generation who speak the dialect in Taiwan.
Concern over language preservation spurred the beginnings of a Hakka cultural renaissance. In 1987, four Hakka journalists began publishing Hakka Wind and Clouds, a monthly magazine covering politics and social movements of interest to the Hakka and promoting Hakka culture. The following year, the magazine founders launched a Taipei street march proclaiming the message: "Give back our mother tongue." The march attracted ten thousand supporters and served to give higher visibility to the importance of language in cultural preservation. Many marchers carried posters of Sun Yat-sen, perhaps the most famous Hakka, depicted muzzled with a surgeon's mask. It was the first large-scale demonstration for Hakka rights.
The Hakka movement has continued, although sporadically. After the founders of Hakka Wind and Clouds had a falling out, in 1990 the magazine changed editorial leadership and became Hakka Monthly. The magazine now has a circulation of about five thousand. A second and smaller bimonthly magazine, Wind & Clouds in the Six Hills ("six hills" refers to a network of Hakka towns in southern Taiwan), is also being published, and a growing number of small regional newspapers now address Hakka issues. This year, Taiwan gained its first magazine written in the Hakka dialect, Hakka Taiwan, a bimonthly literary magazine produced by poet Huang Tse-yao. (The written forms of Hakka and other Chinese dialects all use the same Chinese characters, but with different grammar and word selections.)
Dictionaries and books on Hakka culture are increasing, as are audio and video tapes on Hakka folk music and opera. Tu Chun-ching of Hakka Monthly calls the new trend phenomenal. "In the past few years, a great number of Hakka-related publications have suddenly appeared," he says. "Major publishing companies have begun including Hakka projects in their agenda. Video companies specializing in Hakka entertainment have emerged to supply the new audience."
On television, non-Mandarin programming had long been limited to no more than 30 percent of programming on the three stations. Of this, Hakka shows consisted of only twenty minutes of news programming on each station, plus two half-hour shows on one of the stations. On the radio, dialect programming also could not exceed one-third on FM stations or 45 percent on AM. Hakka radio shows consisted mainly of programming aired in Hakka communities. These restrictions were officially revoked in July 1993, but those hoping to boost Hakka programming fear that this move may actually push the dialect off the air completely, since most new programming is in Taiwanese.
Hakka activists agree that the first priority should be on building enthusiasm among the younger generations. Many worry that if they do not pick up the torch, the movement will soon die out, taking the Hakka culture with it. Linguist Luo Chao-chin warns that the local Hakka could go the way of the Pingpu, an indigenous tribe that is now completely assimilated. "It's easy for low-profile ethnic groups to disappear or become museum artifacts," Luo says. "This could be the fate of Hakka culture if the movement doesn't make a difference now. If the Hakka culture disappears, we will lose a piece of Chinese history." Luo hopes that the Hakka movement will win the support not only of Hakka, but of all Taiwan residents, as a valuable part of the island's cultural resources. "I hope that as Taiwan gets richer and richer, people will turn to cultural pursuits and realize that each dialect or ethnic culture can contribute to the quality of life," he says.
The Hakka movement got a boost in April, when the Ministry of Education announced that dialects and the languages of indigenous tribes can be offered as electives in elementary schools. Several elementary schools in Taipei, Pingtung, and Hsinchu counties now offer Hakka in the curriculum. In July, Pingtung county primary school students toured the island presenting a talent show in the dialect.
Since 1990, Hakka Monthly and HAPA have co-sponsored cultural camps for kids and adults. The fourth annual Hakka Culture Summer Camp, held in August, featured seventeen Hakka leaders in politics, business, academics, and professional arenas. They spoke on Hakka history, dialect, folk arts, and folklore.
At the college level, with funding from HAPA, students at twelve universities have formed Hakka clubs. Graduate history student Liu Huei-chen, who founded the Hakka Studies Club at National Taiwan Normal University in 1991, explains that starting such groups has not been easy. "Some school authorities at the hearing disapproved, fearing that, with its strong emphasis on ethnic identity, such a club might promote segregation," Liu says. "I fought hard, compromised, and eventually got the club founded, but without an on-campus office." The club has attracted twenty active members in its two-year history.
Since then, Liu and student supporters have encouraged other Hakka students to follow in their footsteps. She helped to establish a network of university Hakka clubs around the island. It is this sort of enthusiasm that older Hakka activists are desperately trying to instill in the younger generations. They hope that other young Hakka will share Liu's motivation for transforming their ethnic group from one that is invisible to one that is proud to celebrate its heritage and culture. Says Liu, "I want to be someone who ignites the fire."