Huang Qingwei (b. 1938), my paternal grandfather, has lived in Rui'an, Zhejiang, China for nearly all his life. He grew up speaking the Rui'an dialect, a variant of the Wenzhou dialect. This interview was conducted in Mandarin Chinese on 5 April 2015. Here is a somewhat edited version.
How often do you speak Rui'anhua, compared to Mandarin Chinese?
In my hometown, I usually speak Rui'anhua more, of course. Here in the US, besides with your dad and mom, I really cannot speak it. With you I have to speak Mandarin.
In Rui'an, in which situations do you speak Mandarin? What about the dialect?
Many of our neighbors are northerners, from Liaoning. With those neighbors, I have to speak in Mandarin, not Rui'anhua.
Here is an example: One day, one of our neighbors, Dr. Zhou, a gynecologist, was trying to get her patient, an old lady, to lie down. She gestured for her to lie down. But the patient just didn't understand. She was a Rui'anese, from the rural areas, and she didn't understand Mandarin. So Dr. Zhou was stuck. Eventually, she got another doctor to come help.
Nowadays in China, at school and at work, they mostly speak Mandarin, right?
Yes, nowadays, there is such a trend among the children. After preschool they mostly use Mandarin. So children can only speak Rui'anhua at home, with their parents or siblings. And now, they no longer speak Rui'anhua as smoothly, since they speak Mandarin so often.
Our Rui'anhua, after another generation, may be gone. No one will speak Rui'anhua. Except in the countryside. In the countryside, they almost all can speak Mandarin. In more mountainous areas, places that are harder to get to, they may still speak their local tongue, Rui'anhua.
In speech, instead of talking about Rui'an, we often talk about Wenzhou, since Wenzhou is the larger region that contains Rui'an. We Rui'anese, when traveling around, would say we come from Wenzhou. If we say "Rui'an", they wouldn't know, but if we say "Wenzhou," they would know where that is.
What was the situation like thirty, sixty years ago, when you went to school or when Dad went to school? How much Rui'anhua, how much Mandarin did they speak at school or at work?
Back then it was mostly Rui'anhua. They didn't know how to speak Mandarin.
After the liberation [Note: Liberation took place around 1949], not until the '70s did Mandarin begin to become common. Before then, Rui'anhua definitely had the upper hand, since in schools they only spoke Rui'anhua. In classes, the students and teachers all spoke Rui'anhua. There was no Mandarin there.
When I was in junior high, Mandarin still wasn't ubiquitous. It wasn't spoken everywhere at my school. We usually spoke Rui'anhua. It was only if the teacher was a northerner and spoke Mandarin; still, in those cases we could understand.
In the '60s and '70s, Mandarin was promoted and became more common. Outsiders came. The Southward Cadres [Note: I'm guessing about the translation. This was a group of northern peasants that accompanied the People's Liberation Army southward; they helped with logistics.] spoke Mandarin. Or rather, they spoke the dialects of their hometowns - the dialects of Shandong, Jiangsu. They didn't have a unified, standard of Mandarin. Later, it slowly became standardized.
In the schools, when the elementary school teachers began to all use Mandarin to teach, then Mandarin really began to become common.
...Did you already know Mandarin before it became common? When did you learn Mandarin?
In elementary school, I only knew Rui'anhua; in junior high, I gradually came to know Mandarin. It was because over summer break, we students had activities. We organized and did some singing, some dancing, some theater. Those were plays, and for those plays we needed to use Mandarin. In elementary school, we also put on plays. Back then, very few people knew Mandarin. But we found a preschool teacher who came from Beijing. She/he taught us how to read the script. [...] So when I began learning Mandarin, it was from the Beijing dialect [...].
So it was pretty accurate?
Yeah. When other people meet me, and they are like, "Where do you come from?" And I say, "I am from Wenzhou." They would be surprised, "You are Wenzhounese? You speak Mandarin so well, I can't even tell!"
I know that in the Mandarin spoken by Mom's parents, one can definitely notice the influence of their local dialects.
Your maternal grandparents [Note: “外婆外公”] only went through one year of junior high, because of the Cultural Revolution. So they stopped their education and participated in the Revolution. When they came back, they started working.
So you were earlier then them?
I am about ten years older than they are. By the time of the Cultural Revolution, I had already married.
So, the education that your father received in elementary school was all in Mandarin.
[...]
In the end, Wenzhouhua, Rui'anhua, even local dialects in general, will gradually die away. Take Shanghai as an example. The people of Shanghai speak Shanghaihua. However, their children speak Mandarin at school, and barely know any phrases of Shanghaihua. Now, artists and intellectuals perceive the danger. The danger towards local dialects is present throughout all of China, regardless of where in China.
In addition to the ideas I listed under the "Interview" page, my grandfather described how Mandarin really arrived in Rui'an - although there were northerners in Rui'an when my grandfather was in junior high, Mandarin only became widespread in the 1960s. My grandfather also noted how the Cultural Revolution interrupted the education of my mother's parents.