Justin Wong is a Dominion Post reporter. He was born in Aotearoa New Zealand but grew up in Hong Kong, and his first language is Cantonese.
OPINION: I still remember the moment when I realised how important Cantonese was in New Zealand history.
It was the mid-semester break at my first year of university in Auckland – barely six months since I left Hong Kong. I seized the opportunity to get out of the city for Te Whanganui-a-Tara to visit a childhood friend and do some exploring of a country that is technically my ‘home’.
At Te Papa’s ‘Passports/Uruwhenua’ exhibition, a signboard caught my eye – an image of a map dated back to 1888, titled 鳥施崙金山南島圖: a map of the goldfields in the South Island of New Zealand.
It was made by a Presbyterian minister, Reverend Alexander Don, who knew Cantonese from his time in Canton (Guangzhou) and opened a church in Dunedin in 1897 for Chinese gold miners – most of whom originated from the Panyu district just north of Canton.
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The English names of towns were transliterated. They only meant something if you pronounced them in Cantonese; they were gibberish in Mandarin. Queenstown became 均士頓; 敦衣殿大埠 (“the great port of Dunedin”) was the city’s first Chinese name; and Greymouth was named 企喱茂.
Five years later, I moved to Wellington for my current job and found more titbits of Cantonese history scattered around the capital, thanks to the Wellington Chinese History website. The earliest Chinese settlements in Wellington were set up in the 1860s and concentrated around Frederick and Haining streets in the city centre.
Associations for the Cantonese diaspora started popping up there in the 19th to early 20th centuries, like the Tung Jung Association which was founded in 1926 at 2 Frederick St.
An Evening Post story about a Chinese Christian wedding at the Anglican Chinese Mission Church (also on Fredrick St) on February 7, 1929, noted the service was conducted “partly in Cantonese and partly in English”.
Somehow, despite well-documented evidence that Cantonese was the dominant language spoken by early Chinese settlers in 1860s, it was omitted by the Chinese Language Week (NZCLW) for years alongside other languages like Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew or Shanghainese.
It wasn’t until lobbying by Richard Leung, the immediate past president of the New Zealand Chinese Association, that an essay about Chinese language history was commissioned and uploaded to the NZCLW’s website this year.
But there’s not much else. Instead, Mandarin still gets all the attention: profile after profile of ‘Mandarin Superstars’ and ‘Youth Ambassadors’; a sea of resources on learning Mandarin. It feels like other languages that are spoken predominately by some Chinese communities have been airbrushed out of existence.
My colleague Eda Tang and I asked NZCLW’s organisers why they prioritised Mandarin over other Chinese languages, as other Chinese Kiwis also saw the week as “cringe” and not reflective of the community.
The New Zealand Chinese Language Week Trust chairperson Jo Coughlan insisted NZCLW just wanted to encourage non-Chinese New Zealanders to learn Chinese in the New Zealand education system.
“The Chinese language taught in that system is Mandarin, so that’s the language the trust encourages,” she said. “It works to make non-Chinese young people aware of the benefits and opportunities of knowing that language.”
“It does not aim to tell Chinese people what to do or think about their culture or whakapapa.”
But Coughlan failed to realise that having the Chinese Language Week promoting Mandarin year after year did not help non-Chinese Kiwis realise the linguistic diversity amongst Chinese communities.
Instead, it reinforces a misconception that Mandarin is the only ‘Chinese’ language, sweeping the existence of other Chinese languages under the carpet and ignoring their historical significance in the history of Aotearoa.
The damage has already been done: just last week, in a tweet promoting its Chinese Language Week events, Wellington City Libraries called Mandarin the “official language” and none of its activities throughout the week acknowledged the capital’s Cantonese past.
Even back home, Cantonese is under threat. More Hong Kong schools are opting to use Mandarin to teach students to write, with some students claiming that they were punished for speaking Cantonese. Since the 1980s, Chinese authorities have been removing Cantonese from daily life in Guangdong in favour of Mandarin, with them shutting down Cantonese-language radio and TV programmes and banning schools from teaching it.
I believe it’s shameful for NZCLW to be complicit in this history rewriting exercise.
I’m grateful I grew up in Hong Kong and still have connections to my mother language, especially when others in New Zealand don’t have the luxury to learn or pass it on.
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