"Yes, sort of," I said.

But of course, we were in Sydney, albeit in a Chinese restaurant. The wait staff were all Chinese, as were perhaps four in five of the diners. All around me, I heard Cantonese being spoken.

Sydney icons
  

And it was more or less like that for much of the week -- finding myself immersed in a kind of Cantonese ghetto. It was interesting in its own way, a consequence of the fact that perhaps only for the second time in my life, I wasn't holidaying alone. I was with friends, who in turn had emigré friends in the city. The end result was that a considerable portion of my time was spent meeting other Chinese and hearing Cantonese all around me.

However, by the fourth day, I said: "Enough. If I have one more Chinese meal, I am going to puke." I parted company, in the hope of getting a pizza, doner kebab, fish and chips, or meat pie. I didn't want to hear another Cantonese sentence or see another Asian face.

But of course it was impossible to avoid Asian faces. Sydney has changed considerably since my first visit more than 20 years ago, and even since my last visit in the 1990s. Downtown, one in four that you see on the streets would be East Asian. Sydney's Chinatown has expanded well beyond its original Dixon Street with not only the influx of Chinese, but also of other Asian nationalities. Thai grocery shops cluster around Campbell Street while Korean shops and restaurants take up much of Liverpool Street.

It should be borne in mind that not all Asian faces belonged to naturalised Australians or long-term residents. There are lots of students and tourists.

The settled Asian population tends to be made up mainly of Vietnamese and Cantonese-speaking Chinese. The story of Vietnamese migration is the simpler of the two communities. They came in a huge 10-year wave in the wake of the communist take-over of South Vietnam in 1975, though lately, the community has been augmented by students.

The story of Chinese migration is more complex, but also more interesting in the way it produced an outcome that hardly approximates what China is. That I encountered Cantonese almost everywhere tells you that some rather unique dynamics were at work.

The first big wave of Chinese migration to Australia was for the gold rush in the middle of the 19th century. They came mostly from Guangdong province, since Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) had been for 1,000 years China's primary window to the outside world.

However, the gold fields were in Victoria, not New South Wales. How many of the miners' families have since resettled into Sydney, I don't know. In any case, it would also be surprising if the descendents of these early migrants remained Cantonese-speaking to the present day.

After the 1939-1945 World War, a steady trickle of Chinese migration took place, but these didn't come from China, since communist China had closed its borders. They trickled in from Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. Gradually, the flow increased as the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to Beijing approached, and as racial discrimination got institutionalised in Malaysia.

I believe it was both these factors that made Sydney's Chinese community so Cantonese-speaking. Hong Kong, as we all know, is a Cantonese city. That its emigrants would bring their language and food to Sydney would not be surprising.

But why is the Chinese Malaysian diaspora Cantonese-speaking too? The reality after all, is that the Chinese in Malaysia are of many different dialect groups. In the states of Johore, Penang and Pahang, the Fujian dialect would be more common. In Sarawak, things get even more complex, with the Fuzhou dialect predominating in some towns.

What happened was a series of filters, with the final filtrate over-represented among the Malaysian diaspora in Sydney -– the English- and Cantonese-speaking Chinese.

The first filter was the bias towards Cantonese as the main dialect in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, even as the Chinese there originated from different dialect groups. I don't know how Cantonese came to predominate in Kuala Lumpur, but would be interested if someone can tell me.

The second filter was the decision by some Chinese families to send their children to English-language schools. Here, the second language was Malay, not Mandarin. So this generation grew up with only Cantonese as their Chinese. (For example, just a month ago, I met someone in Kuala Lumpur who told me he hated going to China. Even as he saw himself as Chinese and spoke Cantonese fluently, he couldn't cope with all the Mandarin, he said.)

Yet, English-speakers among the Chinese Malaysians are a minority of a minority. Mostly, Chinese Malaysians go to Chinese-medium schools. For them, Mandarin Chinese has become their first language, with Malay their second. They have no formal knowledge of English.

The third filter then kicks in -– the push to emigrate as a result of Malaysia's discriminatory policies against ethnic minorities. But this filter works differently and in a self-selecting way, depending on the school language. Those who are schooled in English look to the West, while those schooled in Mandarin Chinese look to Taiwan, and more recently, China.

Thus Australia attracted an unusual variant of Chinese Malaysians, who were comfortable in English, often with Australian degrees, and who tended to have Cantonese as their Chinese language rather than Mandarin.

Even though I myself am mostly of Cantonese descent and schooled in English, I felt rather out of place among Sydney's Chinese. My Cantonese is even worse than my already-bad Mandarin. I found myself resonating more with the handful of mainland Chinese whom I met in Sydney than the Malaysians, suggesting that, in a rather weird way, the side of me that is Chinese identified more with China than with Malaysian, Cantonese-speaking Chinese.

And one of the mainland-born Chinese reciprocated it. Having worked in Singapore for a few years, he told me he liked Singapore. The best part of it, he said, was that we used simplified Chinese -– it was so much easier for him.

In that sense, Singapore and Singaporeans like me are more "modern" (for want of a better word). We are more in tune with the emerging superpower that is China and less anchored to the language and culture of a pre-revolution Chinese diaspora. That surely is the result of our government's social engineering. Starting in the 1970s, dialects were banished from radio and television and Mandarin made supreme alongside English. The simplified script was imposed. We pruned off much of our immigrant history, adopting instead the history of China as a whole as part of our own.

No doubt, you will hear about the foresight of our government in preparing Chinese Singaporeans for the new age of China's preeminence. But as I have written previously, I have rather sceptical views about the original motives behind these policies; in my view, much of the re-orienting of Chinese Singaporeans was meant to serve the political interests of the People's Action Party versus Malaysia's UMNO party and its Malay constituency. But history is a story of unintended consequences, with sly efforts to take credit for the bonus that was never actually foreseen while original motives are quietly swept under the carpet. Being such a familiar story, I won't delve further into that.

The fact to remember is, our identities are constructed. As you can see, it's partly through the accident of socialisation, partly through the larger forces of the state, but also to an extent, through self-selection. Constructed from so many factors, the result is variation: One form of Chineseness can feel more alien than another. This is so even though historically it may be closer. My parents, for example, would have fit right in with the Cantonese-speaking Chinese Malaysians and Yumcha restaurants, but I am rather more at home with the China-born Chinese (so long as they can speak English) who straddle China and the West.

The Sydney lifestyle
  

Then, a generation hence, everything will change again. Already the younger Vietnamese, Cambodians and Chinese in Sydney are speaking with an Australian accent and intermarrying. Certainly, they identify as Australians, not migrants.

Yet migration will not end. Only the sources and destinations change. As the Cantonese-speaking sources dry up, further Chinese migration to Australia will be more and more from China itself, and one day Sydney's Chinatown will speak Putonghua (Mandarin, as the Chinese would call it). I will hazard a guess though, that by then a lot more White Australians will also be speaking it.

© Yawning Bread