a fading culture

Growing up as an American-born Chinese, one of the staples of Chinese family travel involved checking out Chinatowns in major cities, learning how to speak Cantonese, going out to eat dim sum every once in a while, and practicing some of the traditional customs of Southern China during the Chinese New Year. On my most recent trip to Asia though, I realized that the culture of the 19th century Chinese diaspora and their descendants is fading.

In the 1800s, famine and a labor surplus in Guangdong (Canton), China precipitated mass immigration of Cantonese people to Southeast Asia, Australasia, Central America, and North America. Here in the United States, Chinese immigration is usually discussed in the context of the railroad and gold mining era in California toward the latter half of the 19th century. (Remember the Chinese Exclusion Acts?) Up until recently, when one referred to Chinese-American culture in the US, one was really referring to Cantonese culture in the US—descendants of the laborers.

Although my family did not come to the states in the California Gold Rush era, we were part of the Chinese diaspora who left in the mid 19th century for Southeast Asia instead of North America. My family along with a other Chinese settled in Vietnam, where they established communities that celebrated traditional Cantonese culture while doing business and raising their families. It was the Vietnam War that eventually led my family to the US as part of the wave of Vietnamese refugees immigrating from Vietnam in the 1970s.

Chinese communities form as people seek places to relate with people who share their experiences and culture. Traveling to Chinatowns across the country was sort of a staple for many Chinese families in the states. You could go to a city, check out what it had to offer, but also find a Chinatown where one could find familiar faces and a common tongue for language and food. However, as shared experiences tend to diverge, so do the communities. Within the past 10 to 20 years, most of the Chinatowns across the U.S. are fading to oblivion as the Chinese in America have found their way and they've grown out of immigrant culture. As immigrants find success, they move outward into the suburbs to find their own version of the American dream.

This phenomena couldn't be clearer than here in Washington, DC. As a kid visiting my grandparents in the area, we would always head downtown to Chinatown to enjoy some dim sum with the family, or grab a quick bite in a noodle house, or do some shopping for traditional Chinese items at some of the shops. All those places are long gone today. The traditional arch marks Chinatown's location in DC, but the shops and restaurants are CVS, Starbucks, Benetton, Ruby Tuesday, Fuddruckers, all signed in English with Chinese characters. The Chinese arch really no longer is the anchor, but rather the Verizon Center down the block. I head to Chinatown to see events at the Verizon Center but it's rare if my family even wanders down there anymore.


The New Chinatown, by magandafille

The story is the same throughout America though. I hear of the same thing happening in all of the Chinatowns, even the larger ones in San Francisco and New York City. I totally understand why it is happening though. A few of the reasons I find my personal culture changing include: (1) the suburbanization I mentioned above, (2) new generation Chinese assimilating into American culture, and (3) Chinese immigrating to America from areas other than Canton. None of these are complaints—they are in fact the reality.

Taking just language as an example, Cantonese was the lingua franca of the Chinese diaspora for generations. However, China has been standardizing to Mandarin and Simplified script since the 1950s revolution. Nowadays if Cantonese-speaking people want to do business with other Chinese, particularly those from Beijing and all of mainland China, one has to learn to speak Mandarin (Putonghua) and how to read and write Simplified script (versus Traditional script) to conduct not only business transactions, but the most basic of conversations. (They speak Mandarin in Taiwan, but still use Traditional script.) Where Cantonese was almost universally spoken in American Chinatowns up until the 1970s-1980s, it's now becoming increasingly rare. David Pierson of the Los Angeles Times covers the phenomena in his article, Cantonese is Losing Its Voice (reprint at The ChinesePod Blog).

Up until now, I've been writing about the Chinese diaspora community in the Americas. When I traveled to Hong Kong (the NYC of Cantonese culture) on my most recent trip, I started to notice that the roots of the diaspora culture that I grew up in are starting to fade as well. Cantonese language and Traditional script in Hong Kong is still dominant, but it's clear that the shift to Putonghua and Simplified script is beginning as Hong Kong is starting to make closer economic ties to Beijing and the mainland. It's not even the language alone, but the food too. Dim sum and the dai pai deng (small snack eateries) in Hong Kong are closing by the hundreds (the local press there reported over 400 dim sum houses closed in the past year) and are making way for larger chain restaurants and eateries.

Again, I understand where the Hong Kong residents are coming from. Sometimes one gets old of the same old same old and it's exciting to have new restaurants that have classy decor inside, younger clientele, and serve ethnic food from places other than home. Even here in DC, I like the fact that I can eat a different ethnic cuisine every night of the week. Unfortunately for me, one of the varieties of cuisine does not include traditional Cantonese food. There really isn't a good dai pai deng or a dim sum house here in town. And what I find sort of disappointing as well is that it is becoming increasingly more difficult to find a good one in San Francisco, Vancouver, and Hong Kong, the heart of it all. Yeah, sure there are the big corporate restaurants, but I find that it's really hard to beat the quality of the mom-and-pop ten-table restaurant. One can't beat the expertise of mom or pop who has been making some specialty dish by hand for 30+ years and knows the flavors inside and out. I know full well this sort of business is not sustainable in this day and age—it's inefficient and can't possibly scale to cater to demand.

I'm happy to embrace the Chinese-American culture of the here and now as it is a new culture, one that reflects the existing community and who we are. Change is exciting and the culture of today is interesting—I like learning about and being part of the change. My disappointment lies in the fact that my own personal cultural history will fade so far that it will be lost forever. There are elements of Cantonese culture that is like no other in the world and I want to be able to share it with people and enthusiastically explain why it is so cool. It will be sad when I will not be able to do that anymore—and I'm afraid that time will be very soon.