Teochew Families in Hong Kong: The Rules Nobody Wrote Down

Some family rules are never explained. They are performed in front of you until you know them.

Hong Kong has a substantial Teochew community. Families who came down from Chaoshan and opened shops, wholesale businesses, herbal tea stalls and noodle houses around Sai Wan, Kowloon City and Kwun Tong.

Every seventh lunar month, dozens of Teochew Yu Lan festivals go up across the city: bamboo theatres, opera, rice distribution. It is the most publicly visible piece of the tradition.

But the fragile part of a tradition is never the part on the stage. It is the part inside the flat.

The rules live in the kitchen, not in a book

Where the incense burner sits. Which cakes get made at new year. Who takes the first piece. That you do not start before the eldest is seated. What is done on which day after a death.

All of it is learned by watching and copying. No book records how your family does it, because every family does it slightly differently, and that slight difference is precisely what your family is.

So when the person who knows how goes, it does not fade gradually. It stops. You discover that nobody remembers which way the burner is supposed to face.

The language layer goes even faster

Teochew is in a tighter spot in Hong Kong than Cantonese. Many third-generation children understand but do not speak it. The fourth often does not understand it either.

A family can move from Teochew to Cantonese to English inside three generations. Each move takes with it a set of expressions, a set of kinship terms, and a set of things that only really work in that language.

"This accent, I earned it one word at a time."

Many older Teochew Hong Kongers spent their lives speaking one language at home and another outside. The whole story of adapting to this city sits between those two.

A lot of people are thinking about this again this year

This year's film Dear You (给阿嬷的情书) is told largely in Teochew, following a grandson who goes to Thailand looking for his grandfather, and it is built around qiaopi: the letters that overseas Chinese sent home with money folded inside.

Made on a small budget, it became one of the year's genuine box office surprises, and its Teochew-language screenings in Singapore were extended after demand. A lot of people came out of it saying the same thing: that is exactly how my grandmother talks.

Worth noting: those qiaopi archives were inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2013. Ordinary letters home from ordinary people, now classed as world-level historical record.

What are your family's letters?

Your family may not have letters. It certainly has one person who still knows how the rituals are done and can still speak the old dialect.

While they are here, record them telling you: where we came from, why they came down to Hong Kong, why that particular cake at new year, why the burner goes there.

None of it survives by itself. Recorded, it becomes your family's own memory of the world.