Taiwan sowing the seeds of a Hakka revival
TIRED of being cooped up in a Chinese medicinal product factory, San Huang gave up his manager job in 2015 to return to his hometown.
The 33-year-old bachelor swapped his suits and computer for boots and the hoe to work on his father’s orange farm in Dahu, western Miaoli county, Taiwan.
“Our family depended on the good harvest over the years and I wanted to ensure that the culture that has defined our lives is not forgotten and will be passed down to the next generation.”
The gamble is paying off for Huang, who now earns NT$1 million (US$33,000) a year, thrice what he used to get, by selling oranges, jam and organising experiential farm tours.
Like Huang, a small but growing group of young people belonging to the Hakka dialect group are moving back to their hometowns in western Taiwan to get in touch with their roots. Many are doing what generations of Hakkas before them have done – farm the land.
“We Hakkas are known for our passion for the land and hard work on the farms . . . Farming is intertwined with our lifestyles. So if we can make a good living out of farming, more people will follow suit and do it and the culture will be preserved,” said Lorraine Zhang, 34, who moved back to Miaoli three years ago from the southern mainland city of Dongguan to start a camphor tree plantation.
This grassroots movement is accompanied by government efforts, said to be among the most ambitious attempts yet, to revitalise Hakka dialect and culture. There are about 4.5 million Hakkas in Taiwan and they form the second-largest Chinese dialect group after the Hoklos who speak the Minnan dialect, according to the Cabinet-level Hakka Affairs Council.
But there are fears that Hakka culture is weakening, with the council finding that no more than 15 percent of young Hakka adults can speak their mother tongue. Hakka Affairs Minister Lee Yung-te, 62, worries that the Hakka dialect will die out in Taiwan in 20 years without greater efforts to promote the language.
The push to revitalise the Hakka culture and dialect is one of the campaign promises of President Tsai Ing-wen, a Hakka herself. There are plans to make Hakka a compulsory subject in elementary and junior high schools in Hakka towns.
The government will spend about NT$10 billion over the next four years to redevelop a 440-kilometre road dubbed Hakka Romantic Avenue, which cuts across 16 Hakka towns along Taiwan’s west coast. It will also set up attractions, including a Hakka music village in Hsinchu and a museum showcasing art by Hakkas.
The Hakka Affairs Council is working with the Council of Agriculture to earmark plots of land in Hakka areas for young people to start tea plantations by the end of this year. To sweeten the deal, the Hakka policymakers are looking to provide subsidies to groom young farmers.
Lee, who is also Hakka, said: “It is about creating a more Hakka-friendly environment in which people see the benefits and value of continuing the Hakka culture and lifestyle.”
The Taiwan authorities’ plans to give Hakka a new lease of life is part of a wider push over the last few decades to revitalise languages.
Before martial law was lifted in 1987, the use of dialects was taboo as the then Kuomintang government prohibited any other languages except Mandarin. But this has since changed, with the Minnan dialect now widely used in the media. The island, which already has a Hakka television channel, recently launched its first Hakka radio station.
All these are a vast change from the past, when there used to be a stigma to being Hakka, said National Chiao-tong University’s Hakka Studies College dean Chang Wei-an, resulting in their being “invisible” in the big cities like Taipei.
“Most people spoke either Mandarin or Minnan, and so people did not see any value in speaking Hakka. Hakkas also used to be ridiculed by the media for being backward farm- ers,” said Professor Chang.
National Dong Hwa University’s political expert Shih Cheng-feng said that the government will succeed only if there is a mindset change among the Hakka community to revive Hakka.
“If people are not keen to learn Hakka or preserve the heritage, then all the efforts will become gimmicky,” he said.
Interest does seem to be picking up in Miaoli, which has one of Taiwan’s highest concentrations of Hakkas; nearly 6 in 10 residents identify themselves as Hakkas.
Huang, Zhang and her husband Kenny Lan, 38, for instance, set up a group in March to revitalise the Hakka culture. It now has more than 380 members.
Said Huang: “If many of the young Hakkas I meet can hardly hold a conversation in Hakka, then what will happen to their kids? “It will be a pity if the dialect and culture dies out,” added Huang.
To 69-year-old Chiu Bi-yi, these efforts are a good start to preserving Hakka culture but he hopes more will be done to help farmers.
“It is a means of survival for us.” he said. “There is no point talking about preserving heritage and culture if people are hungry and struggling to survive.”