I’ve never really thought about what type of Chinese I was. In America, we broadly describe ourselves as Asian-American and that’s all – there are so many cultures that nobody cares or knows about ethnic subgroups. When I went back to China + Taiwan, though, people talked about where their families were from. For example, my aunt said my uncle didn’t act like a Hakka even though he is one. (Then I learned that there is a stereotype that Hakka are selfish or overly frugal from a history of being poor.) And they talked about how his generation was the first in the family to marry outside of Hakka.

Another time during the trip, I asked what the difference between Hokkien and Hakka were. I distinctly remembered the past, of my mom saying that her side was Hakka but also recognizing Hokkien Mee as a dish native to her province of Fujian. My sister replied, “aren’t they the same thing, just different spellings?” But that didn’t seem right to me.

I then asked my mom whether Taiwanese and Fuzhounese speakers could understand each other. She said “definitely not.” I learned that both of them were Min dialects, and that Taiwanese speakers could cross-communicate with Southern Min speakers. This is even weirder upon searching, because the dialect called “Fujianese” is apparently Hokkien (Southern Min, of which Taiwanese Hokkien is a branch), while Fuzhounese is Hokchew (Eastern Min). My mom then added that for Hakka, dialect families are per-village. Meaning that if you went to the next village over, you couldn’t understand them.

What does this mean? Turns out these two separate cultural groups are significant parts of both Fujian and Taiwan, leading younger me to think they were the same. Taiwanese and southern Fujian can cross-communicate in Hokkien (min-nan hua), but they cannot communicate with Eastern Min dialects (eg. fuzhou hua). Hakka people, at least in Fujian, are further inland and are separate from the Min people. The Hakka people in Taiwan can speak Taiwanese Hokkien and maybe sometimes their flavour of Hakka, which is very different from another village’s flavour of Hakka. There’s a lot of cultural mixing these days which led to my confusion. As for myself, turns out I’m half Hakka and half Min. My mom said that Hakka cultural dishes don’t often contain seafood because they lived in the mountains, which I guess caused their relative poverty.

The other day, a friend talked about how his mom claimed to be Taiwanese but ethnically she was completely Han Chinese. This appears to be part of the Chinese/Taiwanese-American subculture online that is for reunification (unsure, didn’t look too far into it). I asked my family if we had any indigenous Taiwanese blood and they don’t think so. But my family has been in Taiwan for a couple hundred years – how long must a family live somewhere to be considered part of it? It’s like having your ancestor be George Washington and someone saying you’re not allowed to call yourself American, only English. Might as well start calling everybody a South African, honestly. I don’t think it’s productive to use ethnicity as the primary factor of identity. Doesn’t it make more sense to use cultural descriptors (like country) as that is what dictates your values and experiences growing up? Going between Taiwan and the mainland, the people act very differently. It’s on that basis that people call themselves Taiwanese or Chinese, not the Han-ness of it all.