Vietnamese learning Teochew

Yes, two blog posts in one day! Check out this set of videos from Youtube user caohydinh of Vietnamese people in Vietnam learning very basic Teochew. Sounds like this is an organized group of mostly young people who are excited about learning Teochew (and getting in touch with their roots if they are TC). Lots of videos of them meeting up, eating, learning Teochew, etc., check them out on caohydinh's youtube acccount!

Kowloon Walled City

I first heard about Kowloon Walled City from a friend who gave me an awesome photo book (City of Darkness) about it. Imagine a 6.5 acre urban jungle, with buildings for days, yet no streets, no cars, only lots of little lanes, footpaths, and alleyways. You could hardly see the sun on most days because this former fort was so jam packed.

The place was something like 70-80% Teochew! Apparently lots of new poor (illegal?) immigrants from Diosua: came to eke out a living in Hong Kong and spent their days in this super dense enclave. Eventually triads, drugs, and prostitution moved in in the 70s and 80s and HK had to demolish it. It must have been a sight to behold - and really dangerous.

Nowadays, it's a big city park - next time I'm in HK, I'd love to visit.

If anyone has any other info to share, I'd love to learn more about the "City of Darkness".

Province Towns in Sua:tao

The wonderful bloggers at "My Shantou" haven't been updating lately, but going through their archives I found an interesting article about how Chinese from different provinces create little neighborhoods or districts in Shantou where the people there are predominately from a particular city or province in China. For example, there is an Anhui town in Shantou. This is quite similar to the phenomenon of Chinatowns all over the world. Local Teosua: people have trouble communicating with these province town dwellers (perhaps because of strong Mandarin accents). Read more about it here: http://myshantou.org/province-town.html