My mother’s voice was always loud, excited, with every phrase seemingly punctuated by “Aiya!” She was quite a storyteller. That is until near the end when she could barely raise her voice. Even then, there was so much love when she whispered to my daughters, asking if they’d eaten enough. “Hek bao mei ah?” Her generation always feared for enough to eat. My mother was nearly 95 when she died. Most of her generation is gone. The memories of those Gom Benn Village natives are starting to fade. Their Taishanese voices are growing faint. Fewer and fewer of us can speak Taishanese. Who is there to teach us?
Fortunately, there’s Taishanese speakers like Jade Wu – an incredibly prolific Chinese language teacher. She launched a Chinese-language learning program with InspirLang.com in 2014, even as she was still in college. In a recent telephone interview, Jade recalled the journey that led to her career and business. She described coming to America as a 13-year-old from Taishan, China (AKA Taisan or Toisan or Hoisan). At the time Jade spoke Mandarin which she learned in school; Taishanese which she spoke at home, and Cantonese which she learned from watching Hong Kong soap operas and listening to HK pop songs.
She discovered a joy for teaching Chinese (mostly Cantonese and Mandarin) to her English-speaking cousins and friends. After living briefly in Michigan, her family moved to New York. She eventually completed a degree in statistics from the City University of New York, teaching math there for two years after graduating. Meantime, she acquired certificates to teach English and Chinese as a second language, and posted occasional Chinese lessons with InspirLang. Stuck at home during the pandemic, she switched full-time to InspirLang and recruited a 10-person team to create materials to teach Mandarin, Cantonese and her native Taishanese with online and in person lessons, and with books.
She’s particularly proud to offer the Taishanese lessons, since that’s her native language.
“Although in the past Taishanese was the dominant Chinese dialect in America’s Chinatowns, today, many people of my generation don’t know how to speak it,” Jade Wu says in one of her videos. “So I’m afraid that one day when my parents are no longer around will this language disappear? …Will I still be able to pass this language down to my children one day?”
For more than a century, the Chinese diaspora to America was predominantly the story of people coming from the Taishan area of Guangdong – which includes Gom Benn Village. Overwhelmingly, they spoke Taishanese in America’s Chinatowns or wherever they settled. At least that was until the 1970s, when far more Cantonese speakers began coming to America. In recent decades, Mandarin speaking immigrants have come in greater numbers than Cantonese speakers.
There was a similar shift in America’s Chinese language classes. Beginning in the 1960s, the U.S. Army language school offered a 47-week course in the Taishan, Toishan or Hoisan dialect, and another course in Cantonese. But the main Chinese course was in Mandarin. Today that’s also the case in most U.S. colleges. The L.A. Times, in an April 2022 story about a campaign to save Stanford University’s Cantonese classes said there are only 20 U.S. colleges that still offer Cantonese courses. Many more offer Mandarin classes.
It doesn’t seem that any of them offer Taishanese.
The decline in Cantonese and Taishanese isn’t unique to the United States. In China, there are nearly 300 “living” languages or dialects. At least a third of those languages are listed as endangered by the United Nations. Taishanese is not listed among the dying languages. In a country with only one national written language, it was only in 1911 that Mandarin was designated as China’s national spoken language. Today 80% of people in China speak Mandarin, with a government goal of 85% by 2025. Just as in America where many Tiger Moms teach their children English to the exclusion of Chinese, so in China, many Tiger Moms there encourage their children to learn Mandarin often to the exclusion of other Chinese dialects.
So what’s the future of dialects like Cantonese and Taishanese? Well, a generation of social media experts is finding new ways to keep Cantonese and Taishanese alive.
Count Jade Wu among them. She created InspirLang as a internet blog to teach Chinese to her friends. Some wanted to learn Cantonese to communicate better with their family. Others wanted to learn Mandarin thinking it would be helpful if they ever did business in China. For Jade, teaching Chinese was a passion, a calling.
She remembers after moving to New York, while in high school, her cousin and aunt came to visit from Michigan. Their families spoke excitedly in Taishanese while her English-only cousin looked on. Eventually her cousin asked her mother (Jade’s aunt) what everyone was saying. “Oh nothing special,” Jade recalls her aunt saying, to her cousin’s disappointment.
Afterwards, Jade offered to teach her cousin to speak Taishanese. “It’s so discouraging when you don’t understand, and you want so bad to be involved in the conversations,” said Jade.
The lessons for her cousin were a beginning. Today, she’s a full-time curriculum developer at InspirLang, working with her team to make an explosion of creative content for Cantonese, Mandarin, and Taishanese. You can find dozens and dozens of free InspirLang episodes such as “Learn Cantonese Daily,” “Learn Mandarin Daily,” and “Learn Taishanese Daily” on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Spotify. In addition, InspirLang offers paid in-person classes, and Zoom classes over the internet. Jade has also published four books – Learn to Speak Mandarin, Learn to Speak Cantonese 1 and 2, and the latest, Learn to Speak Taishanese. Each book is less than $25.
For those of us who remember only a little of the long-ago lessons from our Taishanese-speaking parents, Jade’s subtitled episodes are a revelation. Listening to Jade speaking Taishanese recalls my parents speaking to their friends. It all sounds so much like home. “Doy gan.”
