Chinatown

Pell Street in New York’s Chinatown, 1899

Stolen from Language Log:

Taishan and Chinatown by Bob Ramsey

Taishan, a tiny, rural district on the southern coast of China, has played an outsized role in American history. Taishan was only one of the 98 districts of Guangdong (which was only one of some 23 Chinese provinces), but it had the advantage of being accessible from the sea when American sailing vessels came to recruit cheap labor in the 19th century. 

And recruit Taishanese they did. Young men from Taishan famously provided the backbreaking labor required to build the transcontinental railroad; work silver mines and fisheries; staff hundreds of west-coast construction jobs. They provided services for American cities, too, stereotypically laundries and restaurants, but an imaginative variety of other things as well. When more labor was needed, they passed word back home, creating a pipeline of Taishan migrants into west coast ports. Families and “mail-order-brides” began arriving from Taishan, and the city ghettos where they settled became known as Chinatowns.

The result of this sustained immigration from Taishan (“Toisan” in Cantonese, “Hoisan” in the local language itself) was that an estimated 86 percent of Chinese-Americans traced their ancestry to that little out-of-the-way place. 

These residents of Chinatown would tell you they were “Cantonese.” But were they really? My Cantonese colleague at Columbia told me she found it frustrating. People in Chinatown understood her Cantonese fairly well, but she could not understand much of anything they were saying, she said laughing. The reason is that the language of Taishan–or “Hoisan”–is closely related to, but distinctively different, from Standard Cantonese. Taishanese was the language on the streets there, not (Standard) Cantonese, and definitely not Mandarin.

Starting around the 1980s, however, immigration patterns changed, and migrants, both legal and illegal, started arriving in America from other, more urban parts of China. Chinatown became a place where Mandarin was heard and understood, and taught in Chinatown schools. 

Even so, as any visitor from China immediately sees today, much of the original Southern flavor of Chinatown still remains. 

Never thought about where Chinese immigrants came from, but this makes a certain amount of sense. 

Taishan, China - Outlined in Red