My father in law often bemoans Rockstar’s lack of grasp of Hakka, and speaking not a stitch of the dialect myself, I recently came up with what I thought was a best effort at trying to facilitate some learning of it. (You might guess I was rather pleased with myself, given my own knowledge of all things Chinese-language related is quite bad. Not from lack of trying, I tried to pick up Putonghua on maybe 3 separate occasions through the years but chinese literacy is one of the (very) few things that continually eludes me <hangs head>)
Ta-daa
I located some of Rockstar’s old Putonghua picture books from when he had a personal tutor as a baby, and suggested Kings or my visiting inlaws could use the same picture books for Hakka words, all of us being of the race of “Malaysian Chinese” who are illiterate in Chinese.
(User’s Guide For Dummies: Apply as needed to various Chinese dialects spoken by the grandparents – from Biggest Dummy a.k.a. Me.)
I don’t know if this helps or hurts Rockstar’s Putonghua learning; English is very much my (and therefore his) primary language (I should probably mention Cantonese speaking local mummy friends have expressed to me this is a desirable trait for schooling purposes – and then at least half my Malaysian mummy friends living here will then express a similar opinion re Putonghua literacy – talk about Grass Is Greener Syndrome haha) plus I don’t know anything about Putonghua or Hakka to be able to tell, but Kings’ has a strong leg up over me in spoken Putonghua from being a native Hakka speaker (apparently Putonghua roughly sounds quite similar to his Hakka – though he’s had complaints about his pronunciation, my thinking is at least he can understand/ be understood in his Putonghua, which is wayy better than me).
I’m also not sure if the Hakka spoken in this village in Malaysia is similar to what we might be able to find in Northasia – certainly the Hokkien is different, our Hokkien has some Bahasa thrown in – I learnt that when I tried to impress Taiwanese RMs: major FAIL – but we’re not trying to win any awards in Hakka oratory here, just scratch an itch, appease a grandparent. It’s CNY, after all.
Inside one of the books - I figured the pictures would help for any dialects grandparents would like to teach the kids, they can actually go around the home pointing/ searching out stuff and make a game of it right?
Well at least I’m certain (and intend to be pleased with, thank you very much) the effort will help Rockstar’s Hakka.
On an aside, I happened to come across some discussion chains on Northasian blogs about Chinese and Western culture recently, and some of the intolerance and erm, seemingly visceral anger was quite an eye-opener. Hong Kong at a glance has a lot more Western-Asian mixed-race couples than say, Malaysia, Singapore or what I can see of various parts of Australia that we’ve visited, so I hadn’t thought there was intolerance to mixed-race children (I guess they mean the obvious Western-Chinese mix, I did not spend a lot of time on the web pages)…
And well HK in general being wayy more outspoken than say Malaysia or Singapore, I guess I shouldn’t have been as taken aback as I was. No I am not linking you there because I don’t want these people to know I exist – not that I think anyone would care though, me being neither Chinese (by Northasian definition) nor Western and not having much knowledge on the intricacies and histories of some of their arguments…
Anyway. Because we attend one of several churches in HK that are led by American (white/Caucasian) pastors, it’s a fair guesstimate that the number of obviously mixed-race couples/ kids might even occasionally outnumber the non-mixed ones in the congregation. (Rockstar of course being considered “100% Malaysian-Chinese.” On an aside when I was pregnant previously I was drooling over that gorgeous coloring you only get from mixed races and then Kings would go, “Uh, you know our child is not going to look like that right?” My then-boss even guffawed, “You better hope your child doesn’t look like that or you’re in trouble!”) Other than that it was something we’d kind of barely thought about, it was just always there, the entire 7.5 years we’ve been attending these churches after Singaporean friends brought us when we first arrived.
Our church lai see... Strange coincidence, we'd been so busy with the grandparents we hadn't been to church in weeks, and then we bumped into a friend who gave Ryan one yesterday and so when I was out blogging I happened to have it with me and took a pic
Yes Really, our pastors are white/ Caucasian. Sigh the number of whites/ Caucasians here who know more Chinese than I do is just not funny anymore 
Yet the funniest thing to my mind was, as I watched Rockstar occasionally play with some of these kids, on the inside I’d often felt like part of a mixed race couple myself. In the sense that coming from several generations of Straits-born Chinese who love their Nyonya kebayas (funny story – I recently discovered a very traditional Korean friend living here goes to great lengths to order the handmade ones, with no idea I’m Nyonya and happily buy from Gurney Plaza when I’m in Penang – I like to wear them with cargo pants and nice heels, preferably Prada) marrying into a Hakka family from a very traditional, conservative small Hakka village community makes me feel we are a mixed race couple.
(It’s why I loved watching Dharma & Greg and Kings used to go to great lengths to obtain their old episodes when we first started dating – they’re both white, but Dharma is from a crazy hippie family and Greg is from an uppity lawyer family… There’s this one episode where Dharma gets drunk and tells her Taiwanese friend who’s marrying a white Jewish guy that she and Greg are so different she doesn’t know how she ever thought the marriage could work… OK – Do I just have this giant “L” on my forehead for totally cracking up?)
Well those curious auntie shopkeepers from the Mainland who used to approach me, dangling baby Rockstar from a harness on my front, with “Is the father Chinese? Because the baby looks very Chinese,” were closer than they could’ve guessed, to sussing out our own little “mixed marriage.”
To some Northasians, I apparently don’t look “very Chinese.” When I don’t dress nice enough, apartment guards have mistaken me for a domestic help haha. Especially when I have a tan. I’ve had senior Taiwanese RMs stare at my face thoughtfully, then blurt things like “You sure no one fooled around a long time ago? Because those really aren’t pure Chinese features..” (No offense taken – none was intended, some of the RMs I served could be really wild, I mean they do entertain the rich and occasionally famous and all, a lot of them can be really “happening” – during a party that was kind of my final meet-the-RMs-interview, I watched a couple team heads on the floor gyrating away as their team members slipped HKD notes folded length-wise into their belts.)
Anyway, they were just random thoughts. Along the lines of I just think it’s getting harder and harder to stereotype based on what we think we know of certain races, their traditions and so on, because the world is continually becoming a smaller place and it’s hard for cultures not to be influenced at least a wee bit by each other… I mean, I’m still taken by the whole “Lo Yee Sang” thing… (Seriously, can no one tell me why Yee Sang is a huge thing for Malaysian CNYs and almost non-existent in HK? Where did the Yee Sang thing come from then? Ok thank you, Wikipedia.)
But it was interesting to hear fastidious 4yr old Rockstar explain his heritage to us, “I’m Malaysian and Hongkong-er,” when asked. “Because my parents are Malaysian Chai-nese but I was born here.” We haven’t been able to come up with an improvement on his statement of fact yet – it was either that or “I’m a talking potato. Hee.”
Ps: Bearing in mind the Law Of Averages (i.e. the most people I’ve ever encountered would’ve been from my own race and therefore that increases the probability I will meet more mean people of my own race), I find it hard to be very intolerant of other races because the meanest things ever done to me have been by people of my own race.
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