(Originally posted to Imagine Otherwise Substack of the Center for Asian American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary.)
That’s not Cantonese
My first trip to China was in 1986. I was on the American side of a cultural exchange program hosted by a university in Xi’an. In this summer program, each of us was paired with a Chinese counterpart. Mine bluntly told me,
“Ni bushi zhongguoren. Ni shi meijihuaren.”
You are not Chinese. You are Chinese American.
To be fair, I had made the same claim when my mom was pressuring me to marry Chinese. I told her,
“I am not like people who grew up in China.”
My Chinese partner was from Jiangxi province. I was born in Hong Kong, and my parents were from Guangdong province. In other words, I was Cantonese. To my horror, one day, he found a student from Guangzhou and said to me, “Speak to her in Cantonese!”
Was this a test?
When the student heard me, she bluntly said, “that’s not Cantonese.” My partner had a good laugh. I was deeply embarrassed.
Back then, I was trying to find common ground, saying that I was also Chinese, but I didn’t realize that the dialect of Yue (粤语 / Cantonese) that my family spoke was not intelligible to “standard Cantonese” speakers. My ancestors are from Hoisan (台山, Taishan).
Over the last few decades, Hoisanva (Taishanese) has been at risk of being erased by Cantonese and Mandarin.
First Homeland of Overseas Chinese
My first visit to Hoisan was in 1997. I went with my mom, my wife, and her father. We booked a tour of China and added a visit to our ancestral villages. On that trip, I noticed how much nicer my mom’s ancestral home was than my dad’s.
The homes in my dad’s village (仪风里, Yifengli) were pretty basic. My mom’s new village (东成里, Dongchengli) was built on a hill that included only the homes of her grandfather’s family. Built with overseas money, they were noticeably grander.
I would later learn how our family story fits into the larger story of overseas Hoisan people. In the genealogy book, it reads that my great grandfather “moved to Dongchengli on the 22nd day of the 12th lunar month in the first year of the Republic of China.”
For over a hundred years, from the 1850s to 1960s, Hoisan people were the primary overseas Chinese around the world. Until the late 20th century, 80% of Chinese immigrants to the United States and Canada were from Hoisan. At that time, in Chinatowns from San Francisco to New York City and Vancouver, Hoisan culture was Chinese culture.
In July 2026, I went to Hoisan again with my wife, our children, and their partners. My three adult children were born and raised in San Francisco. When we were in Hoisan, they were amazed by how familiar everything was—architecture, food, music, language, everything.
When I close my eyes to remember and listen, I hear her speaking to dad in Taishanese, but I hear her speaking to me only in Cantonese. She wanted me to have the prestigious language.
The massive, multi-story Taishan City Museum of Overseas Chinese Culture (台山市华侨文化博物馆), which opened in 2020, tells the story of how Hoisan became the “First Homeland of Overseas Chinese.” When my children read the story, they could see themselves in it. At my mom’s ancestral home, my daughter had found a broken floor tile that she was going to bring home to clean and fix. In the museum, she walked into an exhibit with a replica village home. She was surprised to see that the replica home used the exact same floor tile design. When she went to the museum store, they were selling a souvenir keychain with the same tile design! The story of Hoisan was also her family’s story.
Toisan people migrated to Southeast Asia, United States, Australia, etc. in the 1800s because of the collapsing Qing Dynasty, ethnic conflict, famine, banditry and lawlessness. Ironically, it was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act that locked in Hoisan people as the primary Chinese people in the U.S., and the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Reform act that open the doors to other Chinese. As a result, outside of a few clusters like San Francisco, Hoisan people today are a small minority overseas and in China. Today, Taishanese is an endangered language.
Every Tongue in the New Creation
Christians believe that at the end of the age, there will be a new creation. Scripture does not give us a full picture, but enough to spark our imagination. In the new heavens and new earth, there will be day but no night. There will be no death and apparently no marriage. There will be leaves for the healing of the nations.
Apparently, healing is a process. We don’t instantly become geniuses. We will still learn and grow and create, but with eternity as our time horizon, anything is possible!
Every nation (Greek ethne) and language (tongue) will be there to praise their Creator. There will be ethnic groups, but no modern nation-states, no border patrol, no immigration and customs enforcement. There will be Chinese people, who share common customs and languages, and there will also be many, many distinct regional cultures. Peoples and languages that have gone extinct will be resurrected. While we’re at it, non-human species will be resurrected.
There’s so much we could muse on about new creation, but here we will focus on language.
Accents in the New Creation
Research shows that our native speech patterns are formed at a young age. By the time we are five, our brains are wired, and our micro muscles in our mouth are formed to produce the sounds of our native tongue. Other research says that if we do not start speaking a language by the age of 7 or so, we will have a noticeable accent.
An AI analysis says that, overall, I speak English with an American accent, but it also detected influence from Taiwan. Apparently, the Taishanese language shares characteristics with Taiwanese. My brain was wired and my tongue trained to speak Taishanese as a baby. Although I speak English like a native, Chinese is in the mix.
Whether we will have accented speech in the new creation, as I believe we will, for sure there will be no stigma associated with the accents, no bullying people into speaking the dominant language, and no looking down on them for speaking with an accent.
Refugees in Hong Kong
When the student from Guangzhou said, “that’s not Cantonese,” she was dismissive of the Chinese American who was not speaking standard Cantonese. I didn’t know then, but my parents and grandmother would have experienced the same in Hong Kong.
Over time, we will all become highly proficient in many languages, but we will speak them with accents. We will understand each other and communicate deeply with each other. We will delight in each other’s accents.
In the 1950s and 1960s, millions of Hoisan refugees fled mainland China to Hong Kong. They often arrived with nothing, took low-wage jobs, and spoke with thick accents. Their language was associated with poverty and lack of education. My birth certificate states that I was born in Sham Shui Po, a Hoisan enclave in the 1960s, when Hoisan people made up 18% of Hong Kong. I was born in these tumultuous times.
At that time, Hong Kong was a colony of Great Britain. Even though 90% of the people in Hong Kong spoke Chinese, the official language was English. The border between China and Hong Kong was highly patrolled and militarized. I don’t know the whole story of how my parents got to Hong Kong, but they would have been lumped in with the “loud, dirty, poor, uneducated” refugees from Hoisan.
The pictures that I have of my parents in Hong Kong, though, show them in stylish Western clothing, apparently adapted to Hong Kong culture. I was born in a Hoisan enclave, but my dad moved us to Causeway Bay, where he ran a custom tailoring business. He might even have sold suits to American G.I.’s on leave from Vietnam. In those days, Hong Kong was the “undisputed global capital of custom tailoring.”
Before joining my dad in Hong Kong, my mom was a teacher in “New China.” She taught middle school students in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Taishanese. Even if accented, my parents would not necessarily have stood out. They arrived in Hong Kong when it was a mix of different Chinese immigrants, before the ascendancy of Cantopop and Hong Kong cinema in the 1970s. With the ascendancy of Hong Kong media, and “Chinese” becoming a co-official language of Hong Kong, there would soon be a prestige variety of Hong Kong Cantonese.
Every dialect will be in the new creation, but there will be no prestigious dialects that judge other local dialects, no bigotry towards desperate refugees, who live in ethnic enclaves and speak with heavy accents, no hunger, no poverty, and no militarized borders.
Remembering
Research shows that memories are imprinted with language. Loss of language results in loss of memory. On the other hand, memories can be triggered by hearing the language in which it was imprinted. On my 2026 trip, I spent a lot of time listening. I wanted to remember my elders. I wanted to remember how they were with me and with each other.
In Chikan Ancient Town, there was a grandmother-aged woman. She came to us and said, “ho song,” listening to you all speak (in English). I had not heard the Hoisan word “song” in decades, but it was my grandmother’s speech. The word means, how fun, how delightful! “Ho song hieng niek gong va” triggered memories of my own grandmother, who loved and delighted in all kinds of people.
In my memories, I hear my elders all speaking Hoisanva, my mom and dad speaking to each other. All the elders of the extended family (阿人，阿妈，阿爸，大姑，三姑，阿丈，大姨，三姨) all speaking to each other in their heart language. They were the most passionate, the most animated and loud, the most free, when they spoke in their native tongue. I see myself in their midst. I see how happy they were to be together.
Learning Chinese
As an adult, I have spent countless hours learning Chinese. I am learning Chinese through the resources that are available to me. I study Mandarin with pinyin and simplified characters. I learn Cantonese with jyutping. And I am recovering my Taishanese with the help of niche YouTube channels and Facebook groups.
I don’t study Chinese because I’m ashamed of not being “Chinese enough.” I do it because I want to remember my elders. I imagine how delighted they would be to hear me speak Chinese. I remember how, with a smile, (三姑), my aunt, toggled from Taishanese to Cantonese when she spoke with me. I remember my mom, (我妈), teaching me my times-tables and correcting my Chinese in Stockton. I imagine how delighted she would be to see me studying Chinese.
In the new creation, I will pick up where I left off in this life. I will not instantaneously speak “perfect” Chinese. Even if I did, what variety would that be?
In order to survive, my parents spoke Cantonese in Hong Kong. In the United States, they learned to speak English. My mom spoke to me in Cantonese. When I close my eyes to remember and listen, I hear her speaking to dad in Taishanese, but I hear her speaking to me only in Cantonese. She wanted me to have the prestigious language.
I imagine we will all be multilingual. Every tongue of every time and place will be spoken there. We will learn the languages that we need to communicate with the people we love. We will travel, make new friends, live in many places. The time dimension, however, will be transformed. Somehow, my Tang dynasty ancestors will still be themselves from way back then, even as I am my Chinese American self from my time. With eternity as our time horizon, we will get to know one another and learn one another’s languages.
What will happen to our accents?
Over time, we will all become highly proficient in many languages, but we will speak them with accents. We will understand each other and communicate deeply with each other. We will delight in each other’s accents. Do I detect a Taiwanese accent in your English? No, it’s actually Taishanese. I’m from San Francisco, but my roots are in Hoisan. It’s a long story.