'Not Just A Language': The Fight To Save Cantonese At Stanford

PALO ALTO, CA — When Sik Lee Dennig talks about Cantonese, her face brightens up and her voice grows warmer. It doesn’t take much prompting for her to break into songs and give a quick lesson on how Cantonese people celebrate the Lunar New Year.

Right now, Dennig should be preparing for her 21st year as the only Cantonese lecturer at Stanford University. But instead, she has spent much of 2021 fighting for her job — and along with it, the future of one of a handful of Cantonese language programs offered at an American university.

Last December, the university declined to renew Dennig’s contract as part of budget shortfalls resulting from the coronavirus pandemic. For the last six months, Dennig has wondered why. Was it because she’s a bad teacher? Because her students don’t like her? Because she had low enrollment numbers?

The Cantonese program was “never eliminated” but reduced “based partly on student demand” and on the language center’s goal to provide as many languages as possible with the resources available, Joy Leighton, a spokesperson for the university's School of Humanities and Sciences, said in a statement to Patch. “While many programs have been reduced, none have been eliminated,” she added.

But Dennig called the university’s reason of low student demand “a smokescreen.” Her class enrollment figures were on par with those of other language courses, she said. She had consistently positive reviews from her students, she added.

That was evidenced by a group of former students who started a Save Cantonese at Stanford petition, which has received more than 4,000 signatures, as well as support from prominent Asian American writer Celeste Ng.

The backlash led to Stanford agreeing to reinstate two Cantonese classes per quarter — down from four classes — taught by a part-time instructor on an hourly basis.

But that offer is a non-starter for Dennig and members of the Save Cantonese initiative. They want Stanford to commit to four course units a quarter and to invest in a permanent full-time instructor position. They want Cantonese — a language that has historical ties to Stanford and is spoken by more than 80 million people globally — to remain a part of the university in a meaningful way.

“If they still stick with two classes, I will not go back and teach,” Dennig told Patch in an interview last month. “That is the consensus. It's a principle. It’s a stand.”

'More Than Just Cantonese'

Three days before the New Year, Ng saw on Twitter that Stanford was cutting its Cantonese program and decided she was going to use her platform to speak up. In an 11-tweet thread to her 186,000 followers, Ng blasted Stanford for eliminating the language that her family spoke and that she desperately wanted to learn, tweeting, “This is a damn shame.”

Cantonese is a language widely spoken in southeastern China, Hong Kong and in many metropolitan areas in the United States with large Chinese American populations, such as the Bay Area. It is distinct from Mandarin, the official language of China, which is taught in a majority of Chinese schools.

Ng was raised in the 1980s in Ohio, where she and her sister would rarely see another Asian person. Their parents, fluent in English, came from Hong Kong but never pressured their children to learn Cantonese.

Ng would only hear the language when at family gatherings, she told Patch in an interview. But she soon realized that she was missing out on a large part of her family’s heritage. Cantonese courses were offered when she studied at Harvard, but the prerequisite was two years of Mandarin.

“It did make me feel like this was not an important subject for them,” Ng said. “If anything, it was academically interesting. I might as well have been studying ancient Greek or Sanskrit.”

She was glad to see Stanford offered a Cantonese language program but was disappointed by the university's rollback.

“It really hit home for me because I suspect that I'm not alone in feeling this disconnect, of wishing that there was a way for me to find a way back to reconnect with my family’s history and the heritage I don't have,” Ng said.

She is not alone. Dennig’s classes helped current and former students communicate with family members, they said in pages of testimonials compiled by the Save Cantonese initiative. Many grew up in Cantonese-speaking households but never fully learned how to write and speak the language, resisted the drills of Chinese school and only later realized the importance of connecting with their family’s roots.

Dennig, who graduated from Stanford in 1992 with a Ph.D. in education, was born and raised in Hong Kong. She taught language in Hong Kong, Canada and Japan before returning to California to raise a family. In 1997, she saw that Stanford was seeking a Cantonese instructor and considered it an interim solution to balance family and career.

“But when I started teaching it, I realized, ‘Wow, this is more than just Cantonese,’” Dennig said.

Dennig’s approach to teaching Cantonese shifted to preserving a heritage. It became a life mission. To help students connect with their culture, she began to incorporate Chinese American history into the curriculum. She took students to San Francisco’s Chinatown. She listened to students talk to her about their parents. And she created her own materials, including a curriculum for advanced levels.

“There’s so much energy in the class because of her,” said Maciej Kurzynski, a fourth-year Ph.D. student studying modern Chinese literature. “She’s very mindful of her students. This is an extremely valuable instructor, and it’s a pity that the university is not willing to support her.”

Kurzynski — who enjoys listening to "Cantopop," or Cantonese popular music — said taking Cantonese courses helped him have a better understanding of China even though it doesn’t directly relate to his research. He liked that Cantonese is soft, with lots of vowels at the end of words, so the language flows. And Cantonese, unlike Mandarin, has preserved the “checked tone” — a syllable that ends in a stop consonant — making its music and poetry unique.

Cantonese is still dwarfed by Mandarin, the predominant Chinese language spoken around the world.

“It definitely allows me to de-center Asia because this idea that Mandarin Chinese is the only language spoken by the Chinese is misleading and simply wrong,” Kurzynski said.

Mandarin is spoken by more than 1.3 billion people around the world, but that shouldn’t diminish the importance of Cantonese, said Gordon Chang, the senior associate vice provost for undergraduate education at Stanford, in an interview with Patch.

The decision to eliminate Cantonese language courses at Stanford was “misguided and ill-informed,” said Chang, who has written several books on China and Asian American history. The university underestimated the importance of Cantonese both for students’ heritage and for its use in scholarships and research, he added.

Cantonese was being dismissed as a “legacy or extracurricular offering rather than something more important,” he said. Many students want to learn Cantonese to connect with their heritage, but the language is also actively spoken and not just a relic of the past, he said.

“So I thought it was shockingly ill-conceived,” Chang said.

Funding A Permanent Initiative

Taking Dennig’s course at Stanford changed Jamie Tam's life.

Tam, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health, grew up in the Bay Area in a Cantonese-speaking family but couldn’t speak the language growing up. After Tam’s grandfather died just before she started college, she wanted to be able to communicate with her grandmother. She took Cantonese classes with Dennig for three years at Stanford and spent her junior year studying in Hong Kong.

Tam felt compelled to take action after finding out that Dennig’s contract would not be renewed, even though she was about a decade removed from being Dennig’s student. Through word of mouth, she formed a small group to work on the Save Cantonese at Stanford petition. About 10 volunteers, who called themselves Team Cantonese, met every Saturday night on Zoom to brainstorm.

The group met and made progress with Stanford administrators, who are now more aware of the importance of Cantonese at Stanford, she said.

“Stanford leadership recognizes that this community, we’re going to speak up, and we’re going to share how we feel when decisions like this are made without consulting us, without including us as part of the decision-making process,” Tam said.

The group wants to highlight the contributions of Cantonese people to Stanford itself and their mistreatment by Stanford’s founder, Leland Stanford. Tens of thousands of migrants from the Cantonese-speaking Guangdong province came to California in the mid-1800s to help build Leland Stanford’s Central Pacific Railroad. They worked in dangerous conditions for low wages to help Stanford complete his railroad and amass the wealth that he later spent on a Palo Alto farm, which later became the university.

The university has not lived up to its obligations in issues surrounding its legacy, said Chang, who published a paper in 2019 on Leland Stanford’s relationship with Chinese laborers.

There were "all sorts of communities that were not treated equitably at Stanford, and I think that should be redressed,” Chang said. “The fact that people of Chinese ancestry helped build the university is a particularly compelling argument.”

The university did not respond to a question about Stanford’s responsibility to acknowledge such history.

The next step for the group is to make the Cantonese Studies Initiative a reality — a permanent, endowed program with a full-time professor and a staff program manager akin to Stanford’s Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute. Only 20 universities in the country offer some sort of Cantonese instruction, and few go beyond intermediate-level classes, according to the Cantonese Language Association at Brigham Young University.

The group launched a pledge drive with a target of $5 million, and organizers have the blessing of Stanford to “investigate the interest” in potential donors, they said.

“There’s a baseline any group would have to show to any university,” said Mary Ng Dooley, a seventh-generation Cantonese American and Stanford alumna who is leading the fundraising effort. “They noticed us. They know we’re here. They support the overall effort. But they can’t dedicate time or an employee unless they know the effort is widely supported.”

The school has incorporated funding ideas from alumni of the Cantonese language program while making sure that guidelines for donor giving are followed, Leighton, the School of Humanities and Sciences spokesperson, said.

“Decisions about academic programming are made by the faculty, who will continue to keep this opportunity in mind, and, at the same time, honor guidance from donors,” Leighton said.

A Renewed Outlook

In August, Dennig wrote in an email to Patch that she was planning to retire. Her students asked Stanford to reinstate a third Cantonese course for the coming fall quarter, an advanced course called Cantonese Through Films, that would focus on issues directly relevant to heritage speakers, Dennig said.

The university denied the request. For now, Stanford will offer only two Cantonese courses: beginning and intermediate conversational Cantonese. Dennig is not listed as the instructor.

Leighton declined to comment on Dennig’s specific situation, citing “employee privacy.” But all lecturers who were let go during the pandemic had their contracts continued through the 2020-'21 academic year so they could search for other jobs, she added.

Dennig will spend the rest of her life devoted to preserving the Cantonese language, she said. With the help of her students, she has already created a website called the Cantonese Alliance, which offers free Cantonese learning materials. She hoped to start a foundation to provide grants and scholarships devoted to the study of Cantonese.

And she’s speaking up. As Dennig watched the rise in anti-Asian hate over the past year, she realized that for most of her career, she had been playing into Asian American stereotypes: Keeping her head down, working by herself and ignoring or being uninterested in the politics around her.

But now, Dennig is making her voice heard after seeing the program she built over the past two decades come close to being dismantled in a flash and only partially saved thanks to mounting backlash by her devoted students.

She took a stand when the university offered her to return in a part-time role, take a sizable pay cut and give up benefits. Dennig thought the university’s treatment of her was disrespectful and insulting for a professor who had dedicated much of her professional life to the Cantonese program at Stanford. That forced her to decide to give in and teach part-time or retire and fight from the outside. Dennig stood firm.

“I cannot accept that offer,” Dennig said. “We feel like we are being treated like the railroad workers again.”

Dennig is at peace with her decision. She’s been able to look at her role through a new lens, realizing that when “something bad happens, it forces us to focus and think, and sometimes it leads to something even more beautiful.”

That “something” is a renewed effort to preserve the Cantonese language at Stanford and beyond, with a dedicated group behind it.

“Cantonese isn’t just a language,” Tam said. “What we’re talking about are not just language classes. It’s a culture. It’s a community. It’s a people. These are people with a history that deserve to be taught and recognized and respected. We don’t want to return to the status quo. What we want is a vibrant and thriving epicenter of Cantonese studies, and we want it to be at Stanford.”