Well unfortunately the park from yesterday didn't choose the name I wanted for it. Thankfully they chose something much better, Hakka Cultural Park. actually it's called Hakka Cultural Theme Park, but you can tell that something was a bit lost in the translation.
What is "Hakka"? Well they are one of the four ethnic groups which make up Taiwan. They are...
Hoklo – 70%
Hakka – 15%
Chinese – 13%
Aboriginal - 2%
A long time ago on a blog long forgotten, i wrote an article about the differences and similarities between these groups. I've been debating just cutting and pasting that for a future post on this blog, but in the mean time i can try and give a short summary.
Hoklo were the first group to come over to taiwan, followed shortly after by Hakka. With the "Chinese" in this list meaning those that came over after the communist gained control of china. The story of the Aboriginal, you can guess, and if you can't, i have quite a few old posts about their stories.
Hoklo is basically a synonym for Taiwanese, as when you say Taiwanese food or Taiwanese language, you are referring to Hoklo food and language. While the Chinese are the smallest group of the big three, they also control a large majority of the government. So the group that often is ignored are Hakka.
Coming from America where there are so many different religions, cultures, races, backgrounds etc. it can be hard to understand the inter workings between the ethnic groups here in Taiwan. With so much of their culture being so very similar, it can be a shame to see how combative they sometimes can be towards each other.
The negative things I have observed are...Hoklo are often seen as arrogant in their view of being "true Taiwanese" and that the countries culture should be their culture. With the history from the past 60 years you can see why people would have a negative view of the Chinese. While the Hakka are considered a lower class citizen.
I've told the story before of having classes where students often say bad things about Hakka, so much so that students who are Hakka, often say they are Hoklo, just to avoid being ridiculed.
The thing is i don't bring these negative things up to be evil. especially when i could tell you that between the groups their are only a few tiny differences, so truly any insult on another is just an insult on themselves. But I bring this up because I have not heard the good stereotypes of the groups. As I always say good people are good and bad people are bad, and every group, country, political party, etc has both good and bad people.
Happily this is one great improvement I have observed over the years. No longer do certain people seem scared to mention where they are from because it means people will know which ethnic group they belong to. The biggest thing is as time goes by families grow to include the different groups and thus the old ethnic divisions are gone. Perhaps in my lifetime there will be no more Hoklo or Hakka or Chinese, just one big super group, ready to work together to make Taiwan even greater.
Oops, I forgot to mention about the park. I'll save that for tomorrow. Oh and I didn't mention much about the aboriginal taiwanese as they have some pretty interesting stories i want to save for it's own post.
