7 MINUTE READ

What could the Chinese Hakka and the Welsh possibly have in common? Separated by thousands of miles and very different histories, they share a surprising connection hidden in the names we use for them. Yang-May Ooi follows this unexpected trail to ask a bigger question: who gets to decide where we belong?

What Do the Chinese Hakka and the Welsh Have in Common?

The Welsh

I previously wrote about discovering my Hakka roots through my maternal grandfather’s family.

The Hakka are a subgroup of the Han Chinese whose name, Kejia in Mandarin, is commonly translated as “guest families” or “guest people”.  It’s a name that says: you are not originally from here. I find it intriguing that generations of these Chinese people have claimed the outsider nature of this name as their identity.

The other day, while talking with my partner Mills* about her ancestry, she mentioned that she is very proud of being part Welsh.

The English words Welsh and Wales come from the Old English Wealh and Wēalas, words used by Anglo-Saxons for the Britonic peoples who inhabited most of the land we now call England, then Britannia. The Anglo-Saxons started arriving in Britannia after the Romans around the 5th century and by the 7th century controlled most of the lands while the Britons still held on to their kingdoms in Wales, Cornwall and the north-west. The meanings and usage of Wealh and Wēalas changed over time, but these names conveyed a sense of people who were foreign, different or outside the Anglo-Saxon community.

The people we call Welsh do not call themselves Welsh in their own language. They are Cymry, and Wales is Cymru. Cymry derives from an older Brittonic word usually understood to mean something like “fellow countrymen” or “compatriots”.

The Hakka

There is no equivalent alternative Hakka name meaning “our people” that displaced the idea of “guest people”. The name itself became the identity.

Historically, Hakka-speaking communities migrated through different parts of China, particularly into areas of southern China where other communities were already established. But they were not one identifiable people, like a nomadic tribe or the Romany people, wandering southwards together. Hakka identity developed through a complex mix of migration, language, settlement, shared historical memory and relationships with the peoples they came into contact with.

It is thought that the Hakka first started out on their migrations southwards from northern China in the 4th century but during this period, they were generally Han Chinese. They were not nomadic but migrated in order to find a good place to settle and make their next home – and would stay for as long as there were no catalysts that made them move on again. Their Hakka-ness began to come together from around the 10th century and most historians see the 17th century onwards as the main period when we can say that an identifiable people known as the Hakka were migrating ever southwards.

From the 1800s onwards, the Hakkas began to migrate out of China overseas towards the Americas, Australia and the South East Asian countries like Malaya, the Philippines, Vietnam and so on.  

The Heritage of Being the Other

My own Hakka great-great-grandfather on my mum’s side arrived in Malaya as an indentured labourer around 1860. His descendants became Malayan and then, after independence, Malaysian.

Then migration happened again. In the 1970s, my uncles and aunts left Malaysia for America, Canada, Australia and the UK. Cousins and second cousins also did the same, moving to destinations far and wide across the world. 

I was born in Malaysia and now live in Britain. I think of myself as Malaysian-born, British and Overseas or Diaspora Chinese. Discovering recently my Hakka heritage adds to my understanding of who I am as a Diaspora Chinese but it does not replace that or my other identities.

I am proud of all those identities. Now I can also be proud of being Hakka, too. Proud of being a Guest Person. 

.

.

Belonging Can Accumulate

In the case of Wales, whatever Welsh once meant to Anglo-Saxon speakers, nobody today seriously thinks of Welsh people as foreigners, Other or outsiders in the UK. In the 2021 Census, people in Wales could choose more than one national identity. Some identified as Welsh only, some as British only, and others as both Welsh and British.

Beyond acknowledging that people may be both Welsh and British, this Welsh Census list also seems to recognise multiple categories: White: Welsh, English, Scottish, Northern Irish or British or; Asian, Asian Welsh or Asian British or; Black, Black Welsh, Black British, Caribbean or African. (It looks like Chinese/ East Asian is not a category in itself probably because the percentage is too low to be shown as a significant group.)

So identities themselves can accumulate rather than replace one another.

A Hakka person in Malaysia can be Hakka and Malaysian. A Welsh person can be Welsh and British. I can be Malaysian-born, British, overseas Chinese and Hakka without having to arrange those identities into some kind of league table.

Multiple Belonging

That doesn’t mean multiple belonging is always easy. Other people may decide that one of our identities disqualifies us from another. Nations and communities continually draw boundaries around who counts as “us”.

In today’s increasingly divisive world, public discussion tends towards simplifying the complexities of real lives and real people into caricatures or stereotypes. It is much easier – and lazier – to argue in terms of either/ or, them/ us, black/ white, goodies/ baddies and so on. 

However, most of us are neither one thing or the other, and often fall into a whole range of categories. We are also contradictory, flawed and vulnerable and most of all complicated human beings with lives that cannot be reduced to a checkbox or binary formula, whether we are talking about race, ethnicity, nationality or anything else. 

The unlikely connection between the Chinese Hakka and the Welsh shows us this curious complexity. We inherit names and histories, but we also acquire new places, communities and ways of belonging as we move through life. One does not necessarily have to erase another. 

Perhaps we make belonging harder than it needs to be when we insist that identities must compete. Welsh or British. Chinese or Malaysian. From here or from somewhere else.

What if the more useful word is “and” instead of “or”? We can be a Guest Person and belong wherever we may find ourselves. We can retain the name of the Other, Welsh, and also be part of the wider nation of Britain.

How many “ands” are there in your own story?

–

Sources:

Ethnic group, national identity, language and religion in Wales (Census 2021) – https://www.gov.wales/ethnic-group-national-identity-language-and-religion-wales-census-2021-html

Image: ChatGPT AI-generated

---