Taiwan Today

With his polite, humble man­ner and easy smile, Chen Shih-shan (陳石山) fits nei­ther the stereotype of a slick, fast-talking lawyer nor that of an aggressive journalist. Yet he is both an attor­ney and the publisher of a monthly magazine. When the conversation turns to issues affecting the Hakka minority group, it becomes easier to imagine Chen in his two professional capacities. He sud­denly becomes animated and talkative, showing his passion for the specialty magazine he oversees. At the same time, he keeps the conversation controlled and logical, evidence of his eighteen years of legal practice.

Born in 1941, Chen grew up in the Hakka village of Chiunglin in northwest­ern Taiwan, where his family farmed rice. He didn't leave the town until the age of sixteen, when he started high school. Many of his peers also left home if they tested into better high schools in urban areas. "The living conditions and finan­cial status of most Hakka in my home­town were not very good," Chen says, "but they always tried their best to provide their children with a good educa­tion." In Chen's family, although money was extremely tight, all four children re­ceived a college education. Chen eventu­ally received a law degree, one younger brother earned a master's degree, and the other two finished junior college.

Although many Hakka parents push their children to continue their education at the best urban schools, an unfortunate side effect is that the youngsters often lose their connection to their ethnic roots in the proc­ess. Chen can attest to the pressures stu­dents face when attending school in a non-Hakka community. Although he spoke fluent Mandarin as a student, he faced a major language barrier after leaving for high school in Taoyuan; four-fifths of the town's population spoke Taiwanese as a first language. "The elderly, and even many middle-aged people, did not speak Mandarin at all," Chen says. To survive, he quickly learned the Taiwanese for "this one" and "how much?" The two phrases were enough to fulfill basic shopping and eat­ing needs. In this atmosphere, it didn't take Chen long to become fluent in Taiwanese.

Unfortunately, in their eagerness to overcome the language problem, many young Hakka stop using their mother tongue altogether. Chen stresses that this is especially true among today's youth, since many are the second generation liv­ing in a non-Hakka environment. Raising his own sons in Taipei, Chen now faces this challenge himself. While encourag­ing his kids to learn Taiwanese, Chen in­sists that they speak Hakka at home. "For the Hakka, the Taiwanese language is useful in business and for improving rela­tions with the Taiwanese," Chen says. "But people should also be able to speak the language their ancestors spoke."

As a student and young lawyer, Chen had little opportunity to support Hakka issues. Not only was he extremely busy, but there was no real Hakka movement until the late 1980s. After finishing junior col­lege, Chen passed the national civil serv­ice examination and spent several years working at the tax administration office and district courts in the cities of Hsinchu, Ilan, and Taipei. In 1967, he began study­ing law in the evenings at National Chung Hsing University. He passed the bar ex­amination in 1973 and opened his own le­gal office two years later.

Unexpectedly, it was his expertise in law that initially got him involved in promoting Hakka culture. Soon after Hakka Monthly was launched in 1990, he was asked to contribute occasional articles on legal issues. These stories quickly led to a much larger commitment. A year later, publisher Lin Kwang-hua (林光華), who was resigning, asked Chen if he would be interested in taking the position.

Chen accepted. He explains that he saw the job as "a way to share responsibil­ity in preserving Hakka culture and lan­guage." But it was no easy position. When Chen first took over the job, the magazine was in a serious slump. After two years of publication, it was operating with no full­time staff members and only a handful of irregular contributing writers. Chen's first two goals were to secure a full-time editor­-in-chief and to build a network of Hakka scholars and professionals to write for the magazine. He also hired several full-time circulation and advertising representatives and a part-time editorial writer, staff writer, and managing editor. Today, the maga­zine's circulation has grown from 3,000 to 5,000, and Chen says the magazine has be­come financially stable.

"The basic goals of Hakka Monthly are to educate the public about the Hakka and to strive for equal rights," Chen says. "It is necessary to have publications such as newspapers or magazines in order to build awareness. Slogans are not enough to motivate people." The publication cov­ers a range of topics of interest to the Hakka: news, upcoming events, Hakka history and culture, and columns on language usage. Recent stories include pro­files of Hakka poets in Taiwan and an article on a local group returning to their Hakka homeland in Kwangtung province.

As expected, the readership of Hakka Monthly consists mostly of Hakka. The surprise has been that most readers are from the lower or middle income brack­ets. "It seems that upper-class Hakka are less interested in their roots," Chen says. "Maybe it is because they have already succeeded. For them, being Hakka is of no importance."

Chen and his staff also promote Hakka language and culture in other ways. Since 1991, Chen has been hosting a half-hour weekly radio program in Hakka. The show, in which he answers legal questions sent in from the audience, is broadcast throughout northern and east­ern Taiwan on Sunday evenings. Hakka Monthly writers are also creating educa­tional materials to be used in teaching Hakka, and they are lobbying to get Hakka accepted as an elective in elemen­tary schools.

Despite the success of these efforts, Chen believes the survival of the Hakka culture, or any of Taiwan's minority cul­tures, will ultimately depend upon government support. The Hakka have spent generations learning to blend into main­stream society, Chen stresses. He believes recovering the Hakka culture, especially the language, will require drastic moves.

"The government must do more than just adjust the language policy," Chen says. "The damage has already been done." The only way to safeguard minor­ity languages, he believes, will be to re­quire that they be included in school curricula and to support their use in the media. "In order to restore the Hakka lan­guage," Chen says, "what we really need is a protective period so that we can become strong enough to compete with the other languages in Taiwan."