BC’s Cantonese Speakers Fight to Preserve Language Amid Uncertainty in Hong Kong

Fay Wong, the director of Familogue, a non-profit that holds Cantonese story time for children, poses for a photograph in Vancouver, on Sept. 5, 2023. The Canadian Press/Darryl Dyck

You wouldn’t know that Cantonese is under threat, judging from the food court of the Parker Place shopping mall in Richmond, B.C., the most ethnically Chinese city in the world outside Asia.

All around, tables of diners young and old meet to “chui sui”—literally, to “blow water,” or gossip—in the language that originated in southern China and Hong Kong.