Dear You Teochew

Within fifteen years, the last generation that lived inside Teochew culture as a daily medium will be gone. The grandmothers who knew the village. The fathers who knew the language. The aunts who knew the recipes without measuring.

The diaspora is one funeral away, each week, from another irreplaceable voice.

*Dear You Teochew* arrives exactly at the closing window. Six years of fieldwork across Chaoshan, Bangkok, Singapore, Penang, Hong Kong, Paris, and Long Beach distilled into a single literary work - at once an intimate cultural history and a practical companion for the diaspora descendant ready to move from passive inheritor to active keeper of the song.

The pen name on the cover, *Gaginang Li*, carries the most identity-laden phrase in the Teochew lexicon:
家己人 - *our own people*, *one of us*.

The book is its own most condensed dedication.

*Dear You Teochew* is for the granddaughter in Paris whose Cambodian-born mother forgot to teach her Teochew because there was rent to pay and a new alphabet to learn. For the grandson in Bangkok who can order from any food cart in three languages but does not know the name of the dialect his great-grandfather spoke when he stepped off the junk in 1923. For the woman in San Francisco who keeps her grandmother's porcelain teacups in a glass cabinet and has never used them. For the man in São Paulo who can taste his childhood in one specific dish whose recipe he cannot reproduce.

It is, in the end, for anyone who has ever stood at the edge of an inheritance and wondered whether they were still allowed to claim it.

If that is you, this book is yours.

Begin.