My interest in the Hakka (客家) arose entirely from curiosity.

To borrow Sara Ahmed’s words, ”Emotions are intentional in the sense that they are ‘about’ something: they involve a direction or orientation towards an object” (Sara Ahmed 2004/2023). In this light, my curiosity must carry within it some orientation directed toward its object.

Having spent my formative years in China–from middle school through university graduation (1991-2000)–and having majored in Chinese history in university, I once prided myself on knowing a great deal about China across many domains. Upon returning to Korea, I set my sights on becoming a China specialist, and chose to pursue graduate studies in Chinese regional studies as the concrete path toward that goal. It was in a graduate seminar titled “Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia” (2002) that I first encountered the group “Hakka.” Skinner, in his account of Chinese society in Thailand, described the Chaozhou (潮州) who worked in banking, rice trading, and jewelry; the Hainanese (海南) employed in ice factories and hotels; the Cantonese (廣東) working as mechanics or in machinery shops; the Fujianese (福建) engaged in rubber exports; and the Hakka working in silver processing and journalism (William Skinner, 1957). The Chaozhou, Hainanese, Cantonese, and Fujianese each carried an identity rooted in their place of origin, but “Hakka” was a name I never heard of as a place. In Chinese, 客 (ke) means guest or stranger, and 家 (jia) means “family” or “home.” Chinese migrants who moved to Thailand, a foreign land, organized associations centered around their place of origin, and built networks that allowed particular groups to dominate certain trades. The Hakka, by contrast, had formed a collective identity around the very condition of being “strangers” or “wanderers.” This was the detail that sharpened my curiosity considerably. Through the long processes of migration and displacement, they must have faced discrimination and exclusion at the hands of the settled majorities in each new place they arrived–and so they came to be called simply “Hakka,” without a surname or a hometown to name them. A sense of sympathy and fellow-feeling for this group I barely knew began to grow in me. My interest in the Hakka was not drawn by something essential to them, but was rooted in my own experience–in a sense of “affinity” I felt with them as I moved closer to their story.

Before my middle school years in China–more precisely, during my fourth through sixth years of elementary school (1988-1990)–my family resided in Hong Kong for two years, before it was returned to China. At the time, Hong Kong had a Korean international school, staffed jointly by teachers dispatched from Korea and locally hired faculty. Aside from wearing uniforms, having a school bus for commuting, and having English as a formal subject, like other schools in Hong Kong, it was the same as the elementary school back in Korea. Yet the fact of being abroad, and of being the only Korean school in Hong Kong, bound teachers, students, and parents together in an unusually close-knit community. Beyond the school gates lay a foreign country, and so the school became a space that symbolically evoked home and homeland. With only one class per grade and a total enrollment of fewer than a hundred students across the entire school, it felt like a small village in which everyone lived together. We were living in Hong Kong, but through the network of Koreans–friends, teachers, and parents–we gathered information, spent time together, and built a “little Korea” of our own.

Those childhood experiences in Hong Kong shaped my imagination of the Hakka in profound ways. Surely they too, in foreign lands, had established schools and institutions to preserve their language and culture, and had cultivated their own networks. When they longed for the food of home, they too must have sought out Hakka restaurants somewhere, and surely there must have been a shop tucked away in some corner of a foreign city–much like the Korean supermarket selling kimchi and instant noodles for us.

In The Conquest of America, Todorov analyzes the Spanish conquest of the Americas and critiques the European attitude toward the Other–particularly Columbus’s approach, which lacked any understanding of the other. Columbus claimed to have “discovered” America and regarded its indigenous inhabitants merely as people to be used for the gold and spices he sought, or as subjects to be assimilated through Christianity (Tzvetan Todorov, 1982). Was I not, perhaps, doing something similar, “discovering” the Hakka in the manner of Columbus? I had never visited the regions where the Hakka live, and yet I was already building a research plan around my projections drawn from my own experience of migration. I assumed that living far from one’s homeland would intensify nostalgia and longing for home, and that this shared longing would foster a strong sense of collective cohesion. As if to confirm this intuition, the Hakka had organized the World Hakka Convention (世界客屬墾親大會) in 1971 to mark the founding of the Chongzheng Mansion (崇正大廈) in Hong Kong–a global Hakka network–and in 2002, the very year I was beginning to take an interest in them, they held their 17th convention in Jakarta, Indonesia. These perpetual “guests” and “strangers,” drifting from place to place, were building a collective “we” out of the sorrow of living in a foreign land and the longing for a home. I had not yet met any Hakka in person, and yet they were already shaping me. It was through this imagined sense of affinity–a kinship conjured in my own mind–that I made the decision to make the Hakka the subject of my research.