Quest to save Cantonese in US

Laura Ng had a dual motive for taking Cantonese classes at Stanford. The PhD student in anthropology was researching the history of the Inland Empire Chinatowns. She also wanted to communicate better with her parents, a seamstress and a cook from China.

In late 2020, she was stunned to hear that Stanford, citing Covid-related budget problems, was laying off its longtime Cantonese teacher, Sik Lee Dennig.

As efforts began to save Cantonese at Stanford, the dialect remained under threat worldwide. It is being swamped by Putonghua, the official dialect of more than one billion people in the mainland and Taiwan.

Many Americans are more familiar with Cantonese's singsong cadences than the more clipped tones of Putonghua. It is the dialect of dim sum restaurants in Chinatown, of northern California towns, where Chinese gold miners settled in the 1850s.

But in the United States too, Putonghua is what many new immigrants speak and what is taught in classrooms from elementary school through college.

Many descendants of Cantonese speakers are third-, fourth- or fifth-generation Americans who find fewer and fewer places where they can learn their ancestral tongue, either to link them to the distant past or to relatives who are still alive.

The reasons for preservation have more to do with history and heritage than practicality, when dominant languages such as English and dialects like Putonghua are increasingly the lingua franca.

After taking Dennig's classes, Ng could go beyond basic queries with her parents to discussing emotions.

"Cantonese is not an esoteric dialect that only serves the interest of a few," said Ng, 28, now a visiting assistant professor at Grinnell College.

In the Los Angeles area, Putonghua has become more dominant in recent decades with the arrival of immigrants from Taiwan and mainland China.

Sophia Leung, a case manager at the LA Chinatown Service Center, made sure that a recent Zoom training for bystanders to hate crimes was offered in both Putonghua and Cantonese. With Heidi Lau, the Stop Hate program coordinator at the Asian Youth Center, she explained in Cantonese what to do if you witness a hate crime, which have been on the rise against Asian Americans during the pandemic.

"Of course, we need both languages to reach the whole Chinese community. You can't cut off a big part of the population," said Leung, who was born in Hong Kong and speaks Cantonese at home.

Dennig, a Hong Kong native with a PhD in educational linguistics, began teaching Cantonese at Stanford in 1997. Once, a student wanted to know what to say on her grandmother's 90th birthday. Dennig suggested a blessing from the East Sea, so the grandmother's life would overflow with goodness.

"To make language come alive, make it magnetic, you need to apply it beyond the classroom," said Dennig, who is in her 60s.

She taught students how to make rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves for the Dragon Boat Festival and showed them around Chinatown. "I try to imagine if I were a student, what would be interesting or fascinating? What would help us get comfortable and inspired by the language?" she said.

For Gina Anne Tam, the Cantonese she learned from Dennig's class was vital to her research on the role of local languages in the making of Chinese national identity. "Not to offer these classes is sad because to be at ease in a language is to gain so much more of its culture," said the assistant professor of history at Trinity College in San Antonio.

Jamie Tam described Dennig's classes as "100 percent crucial" to her understanding of her Chinese American identity. "Were it not for those classes, there's no way I'd be able to communicate with my grandmother right now," said Tam, 33, now a professor at Yale's School of Public Health.

"It's not just a bunch of language lessons. It's deeper than that."

After Stanford officials told Dennig in October 2020 that her contract would not be renewed, Jamie Tam started a "Save Cantonese" petition.

More than 5,000 people signed it.

School officials eventually said they would restore two Cantonese classes, down from three before the cuts.

Stanford is one of about 20 universities, including Cornell, New York University, Ohio State, the University of Hawaii and Williams College, which offer Cantonese classes.

In the last 14 years or so, enrollment in language classes at universities nationwide has declined by 20 percent, said Stanford spokeswoman Joy Leighton.

"The Cantonese program was never eliminated," Leighton said. "This decision to reduce courses, for Cantonese as well as many other languages, was based partly on student demand."

In February, Scott Chun Ho Suen, chief executive of SJ Distributors, a local Asian food wholesaler, donated US$1 million (HK$7.8 million) to establish an endowment for Cantonese at Stanford.

"In order for it to be inherited, it needs to be spoken continually," said Suen, who grew up in Hong Kong. "If the number of speakers dwindles, a significant part of Cantonese culture will also be lost."

Even with Suen's gift, Dennig is not coming back. Instead, she is launching the Cantonese Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the dialect.

Los Angeles Times (TNS)