Hong Kong’s ‘golden age’ may be long gone, but some Chinese still feeling the pull of Cantonese culture
- Politics not getting in the way of mainlanders keen to learn the language or attracted to Hong Kong, says Justin Lao, operator of study centre in Beijing
It is a Friday night and engineer Leslie Lyu, 27, is singing along heartily with a Cantonese pop song playing in a Beijing bar.
“This is one of my favourites! This is such a classic by Samuel Hui Koon-kit,” he says excitedly, referring to Canto-pop’s “God of Song” who was hugely popular from the 1960s to 1990s.
What is unusual is that Lyu is not Cantonese. He grew up in Shandong, a northeastern Chinese province 1,500km from Hong Kong, works in Beijing and speaks Mandarin at work and with his friends.
But he has been drawn to Cantonese for so long that he has signed up for a year of weekly lessons at a Beijing education centre called KUG. Other mainlanders are attending classes with at least one other Beijing centre and online, eager to learn the language spoken by 80 million people, including those in Guangdong, Macau and Hong Kong.
KUG is run by Justin Lao Fan-ieong, a businessman who was born in Macau in the 1980s and grew up in Hong Kong.
