HAKKA

Regrets, I have a few. Actually, probably many, I am nowhere as perfect as Mr. Sinatra. The regret I have in mind at this moment is that I didn't meet my late father's expectation of learning the Hakka language.As you may know, Chinese has the main language, Mandarin, but many dialects. Cantonese is a popular dialect thanks to Hong Kong, Toisan is well-known because of the many early immigrants. Then there's the Hakka people and their dialect, the Chinese for which literally means "guests". Supposedly they were displaced by other more aggressive Chinese and had to live in lousy places, when they visit civilizations they were treated as guests. So the story goes. Both my parents' root trace back to some Hakka villages. Two separate ones, I have to ask my mother the name of said villages. To make things even more complicated, I learned from my friend Robert, that Hakka people from Taiwan has their own variation! (Yes, same Robert from whose mother I learned how to make those origami boxes.) Anyway, it was a challenge I just couldn't meet. I learned some Mandarin in school, spoke Cantonese with the neighbors, but my late father wanted all the kids to speak Hakka at home, instead of Vietnamese. In the U.S., we next had to learn English, and slowly through disuse my Chinese, dialect or otherwise, just became forgotten. I know at one point one a sister of mine had a notebook with many Hakka phrases written down. I am going to try to use modern technology to make some recordings of whatever I still remember. I made a quick search on the web and came across some web site that probably tries to sell lessons, as the phrases they show were long and spoken at a fast pace.

Strangely, perhaps because of the humorous aspect of it, one phrase in Hakka I remember more clearly is the one in the video. Translated with much poetic license just to have the rhyme in place with no regards for meters and such, it goes

Fart
If you can, do your part
If you cannot, then depart








COMING UP NEXT: PROOF THAT LIZZIE BORDEN WAS A HAKKA.