“Why Save Cantonese?”
Ryan Talvola 泰瑞陽, Campaign Executive, Save Cantonese
Summary: In his reflection, our Campaign Executive Ryan Talvola shares why saving Cantonese is not just about culture and heritage, but about empathy, survival, and building a more compassionate world. His story reminds us that protecting Cantonese means protecting lives and communities.
In May 2021, 84-year-old Jean Chang Kan Fung passed away after California Highway Patrol officers dropped her off at the wrong location, miles from her home, because they did not speak Cantonese. Alan Wong, former City College of San Francisco Board President, recalls stepping in to interpret for a woman with a “big purple eye” at the hospital. It was a stroke of fate he was there, else she would have not received the necessary care, since nobody else there spoke Cantonese. When I tell people the importance of saving Cantonese, I tell them about the history of Chinese immigration to America and the communities today where Cantonese remains the language of day-to-day life; I tell them about turns of phrase like “it would have been better to birth a piece of char siu than birth you” (生嚿叉燒好過生你) and that they too speak Cantonese whenever they talk about eating kumquats or bok choy. But I also tell them these other stories to explain what is at stake if we do not save Cantonese.
My volunteer organization, Save Cantonese (守護粵語), was founded during the COVID-19 pandemic to save the Cantonese program at Stanford when Stanford’s administration moved to end it. Our executive director entrusted me with leading our press efforts: there, we wrote both about why save Cantonese at Stanford—Cantonese laborers built Stanford, and by cutting Cantonese, Stanford betrayed its own history—and about how in an era more isolating than any other in recent memory, anything that encouraged learning languages made the world a more compassionate place. Our movement struck a chord with many, including the donor who saved the program. With Stanford’s Cantonese program restored, students use Cantonese for archaeological research, to prepare for future careers in medicine and law, and more broadly to become well-rounded thinkers. No matter what they do during or after their time at Stanford, their deeds keep Cantonese alive.
Our work, and my own journey with Save Cantonese, grew beyond Stanford to support over one hundred members across three continents. We not only protect university Cantonese programs, and even seek to establish new ones at universities like UCLA and UC Berkeley, but also produce cultural content for our website and social media, collaborate with outside organizations in fields like the arts and education policy, and spread the word at community events. I see these efforts as practicing what we preach, and they bring in many new volunteers. I ask them, “Why Save Cantonese?”
Many volunteers say their biggest regret is that they did not learn Cantonese to speak with their grandparents before they passed; many others sing Cantonese opera and write Cantonese plays, seeing Cantonese not only as something alive but as something whose vitality should be spread with good cheer. We even have some volunteers who continue the mission so that their young children will come of age in a world where the language is not under threat. Some join for more direct reasons: the food, Stephen Chow films, because one of us told them to “click this Zoom link, let me share something I care about with you”. These diverse reasons people wish to save Cantonese strengthen the movement, and they give me faith that even if Save Cantonese should cease to be, others will continue our mission.
More precisely, we save Cantonese so it outlives us. We want Cantonese to be spoken now, and for it to be spoken ever after. Queen Gertrude said in Hamlet, “all that lives must die”—this is not true of Cantonese: Cantonese can live forever, and this is why Save Cantonese pursues university endowments and other permanent programs. When our volunteers speak about how they have lost their mother tongue but have lived long enough to see their grandchildren rediscover Cantonese, when I hold in print the zines and news articles we have published about Cantonese, I renew my conviction that our work will survive us. I describe our work in this figurative way because its significance is not prosaic at all. It is a matter of life and death.
Why do I save Cantonese? My heritage language is not Cantonese, but Russian. My ability to express myself in Russian is limited to my immediate wants and needs, mostly around food. While Russian is not an endangered language, it is endangered in San Francisco, where my grandfather lives and where Russian radiates a domestic warmth. I engage with Russian in translation through Tolstoy and Bulgakov, the sound of Rachmaninoff, and the scent of dill. Whenever I return to San Francisco and visit “Little Russia” in the Richmond District, a matryoshka nestled in an otherwise Cantonese neighborhood, it is as if I have reunited with a childhood friend. To lose this feeling would be to lose a part of myself.
When I took Russian at UCLA to reconnect with my heritage, my lecturer, not a native Russian speaker himself, talked about how he fell in love with the language when he studied abroad and learned how people lived using Russian. To learn a language, he said, you have to study more than the grammar: you have to learn what speakers of that language do to quell stomachaches, and how they use that language to express grief and joy. When I told him about my work with Save Cantonese, he empathized with the mission and told me to study abroad in Hong Kong, which I did before graduation. There, I saw “Russian soup” (羅宋湯) on a menu, and upon my first taste (not quite like grandma’s, but still recognizable as something that belonged to me too) I understood what he meant about the universality of language, why we save Cantonese, in a way I try in vain to explain through Shakespeare quotes and sensory image. I later wrote something similar in an op-ed for UC Berkeley’s student newspaper, in which I also told the story of Jean Chang Kan Fung: we learn languages so we can understand others’ stomachaches as well as our own, and care for them in their most vulnerable moments in a way they can understand, an empathy we lose when we do not support language education.
Talking about Russian is a strange way to talk about Cantonese, but these stories are intertwined. For me, it is Russian; for someone else, it is Cantonese; when others come to us speaking of their own languages they wish to save, this will become their movement too. Our full motto is “守護粵語、捍衛多元社會”: Save Cantonese for a diverse society. That is why I save Cantonese.