Cantonese culture, history, and language cannot be captured under the American catch-all of “Chinese.” What emerges when you look to old Hong Kong rental DVDs from the library to explore it?
By Thomas Chan
MAR 14, 2024
「佢喺邊度?」“Keui hai bin dou?” I manage to repeat out loud. Honestly, it sounds nothing like how it should. I’m watching a 2017 Hong Kong action thriller called The Brink, a story about a rogue cop on a mission to arrest, or kill, a gold smuggler who kidnapped his partner. I look down at the subtitles to read that he’s asking where his partner is, but I wonder if I might’ve said something completely different. Cantonese is a tonal language after all, and saying a word with a different inflection can mean totally different things. Like how one time, I tried to say my last name in Cantonese (秦 ceon4) but my friend told me I either said long (長 coeng4), stupid (蠢 ceon2), or green onion (蔥 cung1).
I repeat this process through the rest of the movie, catching phrases here and there, struggling to repeat them as I desperately try to understand the language my parents never taught me. I look to my Cantonese-speaking friends for clarification on a word’s meaning or tone. They humor me and try to correct me, themselves only barely conversational. My friends know I’ve been trying more and more to connect with the Cantonese culture and language my grandparents brought with them when they immigrated to the United States in the 1960s. For them, it’s just a fun movie night, though I wonder if they too are trying to learn under their breaths.
The way I’ve chosen to explore this side of me is funny, I’ll admit: every once in a while, I’ll go for a walk and end up at the Boston Public Library. I’ll make a beeline to the World Language movies section and skim through all the Chinese movies. I’ll pick out the ones with covers showing Shaolin monks flying through the air, 80s-era gangsters smoking in the Walled City of Kowloon, or modern rom-coms about a CEO and her bodyguard who end up falling in love. If I’m lucky, the DVD cover will have just enough English on it that I can make out the premise. I’ll pick out a decent amount, usually three movies of differing genres, and walk back home. There’s only one rule for me to accept a movie this way: the movie has to be in Cantonese.
Allegedly, I used to know how to speak the language when I was very little. My parents told me I often spoke it with my grandparents when we lived with them. I lost that ability though; whatever Cantonese that survived the years between then and now is barely enough to get me through ordering dim sum. When I was eight, I moved away from Queens, New York—a borough of the state historically and statistically diverse with Asian immigrants. My parents wanted me to have a better education, so we settled in a small suburb of New Jersey where the majority of my neighbors were white. In a way, it’s my own “immigration” story, where I left all my friends behind, people who looked just like me, and became the new kid on the block. Not only was I new, but I was also different.
Any Cantonese I knew was immediately forgotten and replaced with new anxieties about how to fit in. My parents were first-generation; they lived through the micro-aggressions, the awkward staring, the complaining about our food smelling funky. So they packed my bag with a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a Capri-Sun, like a true American. Maybe that’s why they never sent me to Chinese school. I was so immersed in white suburbia that I didn’t meet another Asian until middle school. He was Vietnamese and one of four other Asians in the whole school district. Of course, he became one of my best friends. In high school, I got into a magnet program, joined by kids from across the state. There, I met even more Asian people, most Chinese like me. They were the real deal, some even holding dual citizenships or faint accents. But when I learned that they spoke Mandarin, I realized then that I was still different.
Cantonese as a language is very different from Mandarin, a notion I have become intimately aware of. The languages are “mutually unintelligible” meaning that if you put a Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker in a room, they wouldn’t be able to understand each other. There are only four tones in Mandarin, whereas Cantonese has six (there’s actually nine if you include the glottal stops). The language is even written differently: written Cantonese diverged from Mandarin in the early 20th century when Hong Kong was isolated from Mainland China due to British Control. As a direct result of the Opium Wars, it was in this brewing pot of chaos and politics that the culture my grandparents and my ancestors before them came from. I can’t help but feel a connection to the city itself, isolated from its culture and yet learning to grow as its own thing.
Across the U.S., the Cantonese-speaking community has shared similar feelings of neglect ever since Mandarin became the standard language of China. In late 2020, Stanford University stopped offering their Cantonese-language course after laying off the program’s founding professor of 20 years, Sik Lee Denning. In an article from the LA Times, Anh Do interviewed former students of Denning, who, like me, were exploring their heritage and Chinese American identity. Gina Anne Tam, a former student and now assistant professor of history at Trinity College said, “Not to offer these classes—not to give others the immersion that I experienced—it’s sad because to be at ease in a language is to gain so much more of its culture and its depth and its beauty.”
Indeed, Hong Kong and Cantonese culture has grown to become a beautiful thing of its own; it cannot be captured under the American catch-all of “Chinese.” It was during the political strife of British control when the Hong Kong film industry began to take shape, shifting away from low-budget martial arts and Cantonese operas to film classics like The 36th Chamber of Shaolin starring the legendary Gordon Liu or The Way of the Dragon directed by and featuring Bruce Lee. Over the course of the century, cinema in Hong Kong developed as an art form, producing directors and auteurs like Wong Kar-Wai. Perhaps one of the most famous Hong Kong directors, his vivid cinematography and dream-like storytelling shine in his movies, Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love. One of my earliest memories is of watching an old Cantonese show called The Legend of the Condor Heroes. I remember my siblings and I would pretend we were the wuxia heroes flying across the screen to fight the bad guys with Kung Fu.
“Our soft power, in terms of movies, music and art is based on our Cantonese culture,” Andrew Chan, a spokesperson for Societas Linguistica Hongkongensis, told TimeOut. It’s this rich and vibrant culture that my grandparents brought overseas with them and found again in their community in Manhattan’s Chinatown. It’s a culture that speaks to me as I learn about myself and my heritage, after being separated from it for so long. Maybe that’s why I chose film as one way to reconnect with my Cantonese heritage, as a way to reclaim that power. In college, I found many more Cantonese people and I’m grateful to be able to call them my friends. Having spent so long trying to blend in, first as an American, then second as “Chinese,” I’ve finally been able to embrace being different from both. Now, Cantonese culture has found its way into every component of life: I joined the Hong Kong Student Association and share dim sum with its members on the weekends. This past Lunar New Year, I made a traditional Hong Kong-style steamed fish (清蒸鱼) that my uncles would prepare and serve when I visited as a kid. And of course, I borrow old Hong Kong movies from the library.
My regular DVD rentals are a weird bit that I’ve kept up long enough to call it an actual hobby. I invite my friends over to watch with me as we laugh and eat together—an Asian love language I’ve inherited from my mother who would bring me sliced oranges while I worked on my homework. After finishing one of these movies, I open Letterboxd and rate it like all other films I’ve seen. I chat with my friends about the confusing but amusing plot lines or the cartoonish hair dye as the Cantonese tries to nestle its way into my cluttered brain. One of the only phrases I can consistently remember:「廁所喺邊?」It means “Where is the bathroom?” Ultimately, do I learn much Cantonese this way? No, not really. Is it way more fun? Yeah, I think so. If you don’t believe me, go to the library and try it for yourself. And probably, you’ll find me there, crouching down in the World Language movie section, picking out my next movie.
Thomas Chan is a California-based engineer.
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